CNN investigation finds Trump promoted over 20 companies days after buying their stock.

President Donald Trump promoted over 20 companies on Truth Social merely days after buying their stock. This was found in a CNN investigation published on Thursday. In some cases, the President flagged government moves that could benefit companies he invested in.

Caey Tolan and Isabelle Chapman were the brains behind the investigation. And the reporting found Trump’s posts matched with ~21,000 financial transactions listed in his 2025 financial disclosure to the Office of Government Ethics.

In flagging overlaps between President Trump’s posts and his trades, CNN made use of artificial intelligence before confirming each overlap manually. At least 44 purchases cutting across 21 companies were counted, all of which came a week before the President complimented the firm, its executives, or its products. He also made negative comments about eight companies after buying their stock.

NVIDIA is a locus classicus. President Trump told his followers he had “very big and exciting news” about the company’s push to build AI supercomputers in the US, promising expedited permits. This happened on April 15, 2025, just days after he bought between $200,000 and $500,000 of Nvidia stock, CNN reports.

Why do Trump’s Truth Social posts matter?

Unlike past US presidents, Trump chose not to put his portfolio in a blind trust. The White House says his trades are handled by outside managers, and neither Trump nor his relatives can request or place them. According to White House spokesperson Anna Kelly, the assets are in “fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions.”

The absence of a blind trust means Trump sees what his portfolio managers buy and sell. Although CNN reported they found no evidence that Trump posted about companies with the intention of moving his portfolio, and that the vast majority of his trades drew no related posts. 

According to CNN, Trump had posted 6,000 times on Truth Social last year, with over 20,000 stock trades, so most of the activity around his trades and posts never aligned.

This still worries many government ethics specialists, though. Dan Greenberg, a former advisor to the Labor Department, said: “This is an ethics disaster.” 

Others, like Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette of the Project on Government Oversight, called the overlap of high-frequency trading and Truth Social posts “a case study in presidential conflicts of interest.”

The Nvidia-China storyline

The Nvidia issue was brought up in a Senate Finance Committee hearing on June 3 by Senator Elizabeth Warren. She pressed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on the matter, stating that President Trump bought up to $1 million of Nvidia stock on January 6, and went on to loosen export controls one week later, allowing the company to sell chips to China.

Scott Bessent had previously supported a stock-trading ban for members of Congress, but on this occasion defended the president. He said, “President Trump is not sitting in the Oval Office engaging in a high-frequency trading strategy,” arguing Congress ought to “get its house in order”

It all goes back to crypto 

The recent trading melee comes amid a different ethics fight over President Trump’s crypto earnings. According to his 2025 financial disclosure, Trump and his family took in over a $1 billion from crypto ventures and other businesses. This includes over $500 million tied to World Liberty Financial and over $600 million from the $TRUMP memecoin.

The negotiations over the CLARITY Act, the crypto market-structure bill, have definitely been impacted by the figures around President Trump’s crypto earnings. Congress has spent months brainstorming ethical guardrails to limit the ability of presidents and other officials to profit from digital assets.

The law does not prevent the president from trading stocks or making his own financial decisions. Although the STOCK ACT requires him to disclose trades above a $1,000. What Congress does next on the ethics question is the thing to watch.

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