Donald Trump uses his social media platform to advance all kinds of ideas, but the president published an item last week that stood out for an entirely different reason.
“How about this?” the Republican wrote. “Micron, a GREAT American Company, announced that they are putting in 250 Million Dollars into the Trump Accounts for the future benefit of children, and their stock went up 9 points today. Thank you Micron!”
It’s not at all common for a sitting American president to publicly tout the stock performance of an individual company, but that wasn’t the only problem with Trump’s missive. Complicating matters, he neglected to mention that earlier this year he bought stock in Micron, a domestic semiconductor company.
In fact, the day after Trump bought the stock, he called into a Fox News program and said, “I just left [a meeting with] the head of Micron. It’s one of the hottest companies.”
The same month, the Republican toured a Thermo Fisher Scientific manufacturing facility in Ohio, where he touted the company. He failed to mention that he’d bought Thermo Fisher Scientific stock, too.
In May, Trump published an online item celebrating Palantir Technologies — in an especially brazen move, he literally included the company’s stock market ticker symbol in the post — again after buying the company’s stock.
All of this came to mind again this week when the president hosted a White House event at which he encouraged the public to “go out and buy a Dell computer.”
If you’re thinking that I’m about to tell you that Trump bought stock in Dell in recent months, you’re right.
As The New Republic noted, “In December, Dell pledged a $6.2 billion commitment to the [Trump] accounts. A few months later, Trump purchased at least $1 million in Dell stock, and then went on a rant about buying Dell computers.”
What’s more, The Washington Post reported in May that Dell was granted a $9.7 billion government contract on the heels of Trump buying stock in Dell. (Echoing the president’s representatives, the Trump Organization told the Post in May that “the president’s investment holdings are managed exclusively by independent third-party financial institutions.”)
“If Trump wanted to legally remove himself from investment decisions he could do so by creating a qualified blind trust,” Judd Legum recently explained in a piece for Mother Jones. “Instead, before returning to the White House, Trump transferred his assets in a trust that is managed by his son Donald Trump Jr.”
Legum added, “There are no legal or practical barriers preventing Trump from being involved in the management of his assets. But it’s a whopper of an ethical conflict.”
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