By Diego Morra
US President Donald Trump always enjoys a criminal level of optimism in everything he does, from grifting Americans, stiffing contractors and bankrupting his companies. Now, he has also mastered the art of the steal through insider trading, when he intimated that he was pausing the tariff hike scheduled for April 9, 2025, leading to frenzied buys at the stock market that zoomed 2,100%, with Charles Schwab amassing a $2.5 billion gain. Schwab is a Trump partner and keeper of the cash at the Trump & Technology Group (TMTG.)
By the closing bell of the same day, TMTG was up 22.4%, adding $415 million to Trump’s net worth in a single day. He owns 53% of Trump Media through a trust controlled by Donald Trump Jr. As part of the scheme, TMTG filed paperwork to register 142.5 million shares for potential sale – including 114.75 million from Trump’s trust. At 9:37 a.m., Trump posted on Truth Social: “This is a a great time to buy!!! DJT.” This DJT is the stock ticker symbol for his TMTG. At 1:30 p.m., Trump announces a pause on the tariffs that had battering markets for days. Stocks surged but analysts say there are clear data points that prove insiders knew the tariff pause was coming and used the advance notice to jump in on the surge.
The filing, along with the 9:37 a.m. Truth post, bookends an extraordinary day of self-dealing and insider trading, Zev Shalev wrote in his newsletter, Narativ, on April 10, 2025. Basking in his latest scam, Trump admitted the day was a windfall for one of his key partners. “This is Charles Schwab. It’s not just a company. It’s actually an individual. He made two-and-a-half-billion today,” he told his audience at the Oval Office. In January, TMTG launched Truth.Fi with Charles Schwab as custodian for $250 million in TMTG funds. Schwab also bankrolled the bail for Trump and his payment for damages to New York state. Samantha Schwab, Charles’s granddaughter, serves as deputy chief of staff at the Treasury Department, which oversees market regulations. The Schwabs now directly profit from presidential market announcements.
Cryptocurrency markets, which Trump has courted since dropping fraud charges against Justin Sun (who later invested $30 million in Trump’s World Liberty Financial), also jumped 10% on the announcement, Shalev revealed. Shalev said that before the markets opened, Trump signaled a policy reversal to Schwab and their cohorts than posts a “buy” recommendation using the DJT stock’s ticker symbol. At 1:30 pm. Eastern Time (ET), White House announced the tariff policy shift and the market surged, boosting the TMTG stock. TMTG then files documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to sell shares at a higher price. American suckers are born every minute and the suckers who have been gambling with DJT shares are buying a perpetually losing stock that has no fundamentals and merely offering Trump’s illusions.
“Senators Schiff and Murphy have called for investigations, but presidential power makes enforcement difficult. When the person controlling policy also controls publicly traded companies, while his appointees lead regulatory agencies, the system’s checks and balances falter. The April 9th rally ranks among the largest single-day Nasdaq gains in history – comparable only to desperate bounces during the 2000 and 2008 crashes. This suggests manufactured volatility rather than organic market movement,” Shalev argued.
“Yesterday, Trump turned the power of his office, bestowed on him by the people, into a cash printing machine for himself and his friends. The president posted “BUY DJT” (his stock ticker), made a market-moving announcement hours later, saw his stock soar 22%, filed to potentially sell those shares, then celebrated with beneficiaries in the Oval Office. This appears to be a $415 million presidential pump-and-dump scheme executed in broad daylight, from the Oval Office with the American economy as collateral damage,” Shalev concluded.
The trouble with Americans is that they are suckers for media creatures like Trump, who had been slapped with 3,500 lawsuits, his “university” and “foundations” closed down for cheating and fraud, and whose main market in Florida is the Russian mafia favored by Krasnov, the Putin agent, and who had been duping the IRS for decades to reduce his tax payments. Worse, American law and the bench have given Trump a pass, allowing him to use his position to boost his businesses, hosting foreign delegations in his hotels in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the US Constitution and continuing to control the Trump Organization through his son and namesake Donald Trump Jr., who may soon transform American forests as venues for his safaris when he is sober.
After getting convicted on 34 counts of document fraud, Trump was elected by the relic of the civil war, the Electoral College, handing back the presidency to a felon, a man who dyes his face and lies every second of the day. As partner of the equally lawless Elon Musk, Trump also hankers for apartheid and the restoration of white supremacy in a land grabbed from Native Americans. The Americans have shown they have a damaged mind, and Filipinos might be better off with what James Fallows wrote was their “damaged culture.” Merrick Garland and his pals dilly-dallied in slapping Trump with criminal cases and the narcissist squirmed past all these lawsuits, thanks to Garland’s sticking to “lawfulness” vs Trump’s “lawlessness.” Now, the fool is entertaining another run and his lawyers are twisting the law and tradition to provide him with the excuse to do so. Trump gaslit the American people once but how can they justify being gaslit twice by the same felon? Damaged mind, indeed. #
