Trump stock trades fuel accusations of corruption and profiting off presidency
PBS News Hour - Segments
PBS NewsHour
4.1 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2026
⏱️ 8 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Earlier this month, President Donald Trump disclosed that his trust is actively trading individual stocks, an unprecedented practice for a sitting U.S. president in the modern era. |
| 0:11.2 | The arrangement is raising new questions about whether the president's actions, policies, or public statements could directly benefit his personal financial holdings. |
| 0:19.4 | Our White House correspondent, Liz Land Landers takes the closer look. |
| 0:23.4 | It'd be hard to find a president in recent history who has spoken publicly about the stock |
| 0:27.9 | market more than Donald Trump. |
| 0:29.8 | I just turned on the television and wanted to see how the stock market's doing today. |
| 0:34.2 | You know, we hit 50,000 on the Dow. |
| 0:36.6 | We had 7,000 on the S&P. Our stock market is now |
| 0:40.1 | at the highest point in history. And perhaps it's not all that surprising. Donald Trump has built |
| 0:45.5 | a multi-billion dollar personal brand, and he is one of the only people to go directly from the |
| 0:50.3 | boardroom to the White House without holding any other elected office. Look at the numbers. Look at the stock market. |
| 0:56.1 | It's one thing to watch the market, but it's another thing altogether to actively trade stocks while in office. |
| 1:02.4 | Mr. Trump's most recent federal financial disclosure form filed earlier this month reveals more than 3,700 trades in the first three months of this year, a flurry amounting to tens of millions of dollars in transactions. |
| 1:15.6 | The disclosure filing, called a Form 278, is required of senior government officials by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics within 45 days of any financial trade. |
| 1:25.1 | It doesn't list specific amounts, only broad value ranges, and it's |
| 1:29.2 | designated to ensure some level of transparency. The fact that he not only owns stocks but is |
| 1:35.2 | actively trading them, there's just no precedent in recent history. Dan Alexander is a senior |
| 1:41.1 | editor of Forbes magazine and the author of White House Inc., how Donald Trump turned the presidency into a business. |
| 1:47.9 | The key question here is, are those holdings impacting the decisions that he's making? |
| 1:54.7 | And what's tricky about this, like so many other things, is that in order to answer that question, |
| 1:59.8 | you really have to get inside Donald Trump's head. |
| 2:02.5 | In his statement to PBS News Hour, the Trump organization said, quote, President Trump's |
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