If I had a dollar for every time Donald Trump said something inane, I would be a very rich woman. But even with an income that steady, I could never hope to be as flush as the president. A Forbes calculation from March puts his net worth at about $6.5bn – and it’s growing rapidly. Trump made $2.2bn in 2025 via business interests that ranged from selling cryptocurrency and Trump Bibles to offering early access to his (often market-moving) Truth Social posts.
To be fair, Trump isn’t making all this money just so he can buy golf clubs and gold toilets. No, he’s amassing these billions for the good of the little people; it’s altruism, not avarice! “I do this for our Country, not myself,” the president wrote on Truth Social on Sunday night alongside an AI-generated picture of him trading Intel stock. “I’ve made Hundreds of Billions of Dollars on Stocks, and many other type Holdings, for the U.S.A., not myself, and all I do is get criticized by the Radical Left Dumocrats. Very unfair, but what can you do!”
Oh, I have some ideas about what you can do, Mr President. Unfortunately, I can’t print most of them. I also can’t explain why Trump said he’s made hundreds of billions, apart from pointing to his propensity for exaggeration. It seems his post was referring to the fact that the US government took a 9.9% stake in Intel last year. That stake was worth $8.9bn at the time and as of Friday is worth nearly five times as much.
According to the Trump administration, this is a win for everyone. In May, the White House released a statement calling Intel’s surging stock price “a direct windfall for American taxpayers”. Weirdly, I seem to have missed my portion of that windfall. Intel’s stock price has had little impact on my life. What is having an impact is the soaring cost of necessities such as electricity and groceries.
But I shouldn’t be grumpy, should I? I should be grateful that our intrepid president is balancing the demands of the day job with stock trading for the good of the country. According to Trump’s latest government disclosure, he made more than 1,000 equity trades in June. And his picks are doing very well: a report published in August by Democrats on Congress’s joint economic committee argued that Trump’s holdings in oil and gas stocks had risen by nearly $16m because of the war with Iran. “Experts on government ethics have flagged how rare it is for presidents to hold and trade stocks in individual companies, especially since Trump’s war in Iran and his other favors to the oil industry have all pushed up the value of Big Oil stocks,” the report read.
Trump’s shamelessness may be rare, but he isn’t the only politician with serious conflicts of interest issues apropos stock market dealings. A 2022 New York Times investigation found that, from 2019 to 2021, 97 lawmakers or their family members traded financial assets in industries that could be affected by their legislative committee work. In 2020, for example, the wife of the now retired Democratic congressman Alan Lowenthal sold her Boeing shares a day before a House committee on which Lowenthal sat released a damning report about the company. Lowenthal told the Times that he was not involved in this trade at all, so I imagine it was just a funny coincidence.
Still, these sorts of funny coincidences don’t do much to build up trust in the US government, do they? A majority of Americans support commonsense legislation to stop lawmakers and their family members from trading individual stocks. After a lot of resistance, a bill to this effect is winding its way through Congress. The bill does not affect the president or the vice-president, however.
Money can’t buy you everything, of course: while the president’s stock portfolio is rising, his personal stock is plummeting. According to an FT poll this week, Trump’s approval rating has hit a record low, with only 33% of registered voters saying they approve of his performance.
But don’t take that as a sign that the US is coming to its senses or that Republicans are cognisant that dear leader’s war is bleeding the country dry: the same poll found that 72% of Republicans still approve of the president. That figure is down from 82% in May, but it’s still an awful lot of people. Either these Trump loyalists are bigoted fools or they are getting the Intel windfall checks that I’m missing.
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Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist