Doctored ImageTwenty-eight thousand trades.
I want you to sit with that number the way I had to, because the first time I read it I assumed somebody had fat-fingered a zero.
Bloomberg went through the financial disclosures. Between the second inauguration and June of this year - seventeen months - Diaper Don and the people managing his money placed more than 28,000 stock trades.


The entire United States Congress, all 535 of them, all those committee chairmen with their well-timed instincts, managed about 22,000 in the same stretch.
One household. Out-traded the legislature. By six thousand.
Do the arithmetic, because it is the whole story. That is about 1,600 a month. Call it sixty trades a day, weekends included, for a man whose day job involves a nuclear arsenal and a war.
Sixty a day is not investing. Sixty a day is a screen habit.
AND THE GALL. THE ABSOLUTE GALL
This is the same man who stood up at the State of the Union and mocked Nancy Pelosi to her face about her husband's share dealing. Who said members of Congress should not corruptly profit from insider information, while the chamber applauded.
He backed the congressional trading ban. Publicly. With a straight face. Sixty trades a day.
I am not going to tell you he broke a law, because I do not know that and neither does anyone shouting about it on television. Here is what I do know, and what nobody disputes: he hosts the bosses, he praises the company, the stock moves, and the disclosures show the trades.
The White House will tell you it is all handled at arm's length by third-party institutions, and that the family cannot influence individual trades. Fine. Write that down. Then read the number again.
THE PART THAT ACTUALLY MATTERS
You are paying more than four dollars for gasoline. Diesel is worse, which means everything that moves on a truck is worse. Your groceries, your rent, your insurance.
And the news from Washington is that the man who promised to drain the swamp has been clicking buy and sell roughly once every fifteen minutes of the working day, while his sons chase defence contracts and his son-in-law takes meetings that smell of business in rooms meant for diplomacy.
I do not care whether it is technically legal. I care that it is legal.
That is the rant. A country where sixty trades a day by the President is a paperwork question rather than a scandal has already decided what it is willing to tolerate, and the answer is: quite a lot, as long as the market is up.
Mine goes up too. It does not make me feel better about it.

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