Donald Trump vacuumed up millions of dollars in corporate and government bonds in the last few months, according to financial records reported Saturday by Reuters.
Trump was legally obligated to release the financial disclosures, which show he purchased more than $337 million in corporate and municipal bonds since August, according to the forms, originally from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.
Per Reuters:
Most of the assets listed in Saturday’s disclosures consist of bonds issued by municipalities, states, counties, school districts and other entities with ties to public agencies. Trump’s new bond investments span several industries, including sectors that have already benefited, or are benefiting, from his administration’s policy changes such as financial deregulation.
Those industries include chipmakers, tech companies and Wall Street banks, like JPMorgan Chase. (Florida’s Trump-allied attorney general also recently initiated an investigation into JPMorgan over unsupported allegations that the company “debanked” Trump’s media company in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection.) The Reuters report also points out that Trump bought Intel bonds after announcing the government would take a direct stake in the company.
Trump — who waged a yearslong conspiracy-driven campaign against former President Joe Biden, accusing him of using the presidency to enrich himself and his family — claimed prior to his inauguration that his business ventures would be controlled by his children when he returned to the White House. The White House did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment on Saturday. The administration has said before that Trump has continued to file mandatory disclosures about his investments but that neither he nor his family has a role in running the portfolio, which is managed by a third-party financial institution. But the suggestion that the president is staying out of his family’s business affairs has been contradicted by Trump Organization statements to foreign governments and by Eric Trump himself. The timeline for these investments (late August into early October) shows Trump, through his private investments, positioned to profit from decisions in his role as president, all while his administration was contributing to unemployment through government layoffs and federal cuts and fueling an affordability crisis via the president’s ongoing tariffs.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
