Ever since the Stock Act of 2012, government officials have been warned that they’re not exempt from going to jail for insider trading. Just ask Stephen Buyer, the former Indiana Republican, who had spent nearly two years in federal prison, before Donald Trump decided to issue a pardon for him.
This Friday, the White House released a full and unconditional pardon (per Associated Press) for Buyer, the former Indiana Republican convicted of insider trading tied to the T-Mobile–Sprint merger and a consulting-firm acquisition, both involving his own clients.
But hey, let’s ignore the disconcerting fact that the POTUS has developed a habit of issuing pardons like they’re free samples, having already signed more than 1600 of the things in his second term, which is a sharp increase compared to the 148 across his entire first term. Yes, the pardon itself is not the issue here. It’s the fact that it comes at a time when the news cycle is already busy asking whether the Trumps themselves have been doing some suspiciously well-timed trades of their own.
Many former Republican colleagues assured Trump that Buyer was a victim of the deep state and political games, which must have compelled the president to let him off the hook. Now that might be questionable in its own right, but if you take a moment to glance at everything happening around it, the picture changes drastically.
Because while Trump was busy liberating one insider trader, Rep. Steven Horsford was on the House floor asking why someone placed enormous market bets 18 minutes before a tariff-pause announcement, and shorted oil by hundreds of millions 47 minutes before a presidential statement on Iran.
The administration has offered no explanation, and it’s not likely that they will address this at all.
The family record is even more problematic
Let’s talk about the family portfolio for a moment. Financial disclosures revealed more than 3,700 stock trades run through Trump’s holdings (via Foreign Policy Journal) in the first quarter of 2026 — a churn that dwarfs anything a single investor would plausibly manage.
Among the names are Intel, Nvidia, Oracle, Palantir — all companies whose fortunes Trump can move with a sentence, and actually has, on occasion. JD Vance tried to assure the public that the president doesn’t personally day-trade on a phone app, which is not quite the same as saying nobody profited.
And over in Kazakhstan, Don Jr. and Eric Trump quietly took stakes (per MSN) in a shell company that merged into a tungsten venture backed by $1.6 billion in U.S. government financing, according to Reuters. This is the deal Trump personally discussed with Kazakhstan’s president.
While some of these actions are not technically illegal, they’re not the same as clean, and legal has never been synonymous with ethical. Just because there are loopholes in the system doesn’t mean that the president or his family can abuse them.
With Trump issuing pardons left and right in his second term, crime will mostly be a matter of which team signs the paperwork.
