Hey everyone. Happy Friday. Today’s major breaking news: President Trump is apparently a day-trader. Federal disclosures landed yesterday afternoon showing he has spent the year trading the stocks of companies his own administration regulates, and the timing is suspicious to say the least.
He just got back from Beijing without the deal he wanted, and is apparently considering trading away the Taiwan arms package on the way out. His Justice Department admitted in federal court that his voter-purge plan runs on bad data. And Iran has opened a new front in the war we are now eleven weeks into. And Gen Z, the young voters who helped put him back in office, are gone.
1. Trump Spent the Year Trading Stocks of Companies His Own Administration Regulates
The Office of Government Ethics released filings showing that in the first three months of 2026 alone, Trump made more than 3,600 individual stock trades.
Here’s what we learned:
On January 6th, (yes, January 6th) Trump bought up to $1 million in Nvidia stock. A week later, the Commerce Department approved the sale of certain Nvidia chips to China.
On February 10th, Trump bought up to $5 million more in Nvidia. A week later, Nvidia announced a major new computing deal with Meta.
He bought Palantir in January. In February, Palantir landed a billion-dollar contract with the Department of Homeland Security to help run the deportation program.
Also in February, Trump bought up to $5 million in Axon, a company that makes Tasers. Two weeks later, ICE announced its plan to spend $220 million on Tasers over five years.
He also bought Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, AMD, GE Aerospace, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and Apple. All government contractors. Many of them led by executives who flew with him to Beijing this week.
The Trump Organization says the President does not direct these trades, that they are managed by third-party financial institutions through fully discretionary accounts. Sure.
And in his State of the Union in February, Trump himself called for a ban on members of Congress profiting from insider information. Democratic Congressman Mark Takano shouted back from the House floor, “How about you first?”
And earlier this week, Vice President JD Vance told a crowd in Maine that this administration takes fighting fraud very seriously.
When this administration shouts about fraud, they are almost always telling on themselves. The Trump Organization is asking us to believe that out of 3,600 trades, every single one was coincidentally well-timed to favorable government action. That is not how independent management works. That is how insider trading works. And in any other administration, this story would dominate the news cycle for weeks.
2. The Beijing Summit Is Over. Xi Got What He Wanted. Trump Did Not.
Trump landed back in the United States this morning after his final meetings with Xi Jinping.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump said he has not yet decided whether to move forward with the $11 billion arms package his own administration approved for Taiwan in December. That is the largest weapons package the U.S. has ever offered to the island.
Asked about it directly, here is the President:
That is the President of the United States telling the world he might walk away from a defensive arms deal with a democratic ally because Xi asked him to.
Xi warned Trump in their private talks that mishandling Taiwan would push the two countries toward, in his words, “clashes and even conflicts.”
What Trump is bringing home: an agreement that the Strait of Hormuz needs to reopen, a promise of more Chinese agricultural purchases, and an invitation for Xi to come to Washington at some point.
For decades, every American president, Republican and Democrat, has held one line in the Pacific. We arm Taiwan and we do not negotiate that publicly with Beijing. In one afternoon, on Chinese soil, Donald Trump broke that line. Whatever he decides next week, the message has already been sent.
3. Trump's Own DOJ Admits His Voter-Purge Plan Is Built on Bad Data
Back in March, Trump signed an executive order directing Homeland Security to build something called State Citizenship Lists. Federal lists of who is and is not eligible to vote, sent to every state in the country, used to scrub the voter rolls.
But yesterday in Federal District Court in Washington, a senior Justice Department attorney told the court that those citizenship lists are “likely to be incomplete and unreliable for determining voter eligibility.”
That is Trump’s own DOJ admitting that the President’s order runs on bad data.
The tool the administration uses is called SAVE, operated by Homeland Security. In Idaho, an initial flag of 760 names shrunk down to about three dozen actual cases. In Utah, when officials actually checked, the number of noncitizen voters was zero. And the Republican Secretary of State in Louisiana called noncitizen voting there a non-problem.
None of this is about election integrity. It is about giving states an excuse to throw eligible Americans off the rolls. And, combined with the aggressive redistricting push across the South, represents a clear and present danger to free and fair elections in 2026 and beyond.
4. Iran's Next Target: The Cables That Run the Internet
Eleven weeks into the Iran war, most of the coverage has stayed on the Strait of Hormuz as an oil chokepoint. But Iran has begun issuing warnings about something else. The undersea fiber-optic cables that carry roughly 95 percent of the world’s internet traffic, many of which run through the Strait of Hormuz.
About a quarter of all internet traffic between Europe and Asia already runs through these chokepoints. Cloud services, financial transactions, military command and control, banking. All of it sits on cables that Iran is now openly threatening.
But on CNN yesterday morning, Republican Congressman Mark Alford of Missouri said that the Trump administration actually has control over the Straits of Hormuz:
CNN’s John Berman asked back: “if we have control, how come there aren’t vessels going in and out?”
Alford did not have a good answer. Because there is no good answer.
We do not have control of the Strait. We never had control of the Strait. And the people running our Iran policy are about to find out that the modern internet runs on physical infrastructure that one angry country can shut off. The President said this war would be quick. Eleven weeks in, things are getting more complicated.
5. Gen Z Helped Elect Trump. They Are Done With Him.
New polling out this morning from Newsweek tracks Trump’s approval rating among voters aged 18 to 29 across his entire second term. The picture is staggering.
Take the numbers in order. In January of 2025, just after his second inauguration, Trump’s net approval with Gen Z was plus 5. He was actually breaking even with young voters.
A year and four months later, the latest poll has him at minus 42. That is a 47-point collapse.
The pollsters are pretty clear on why. Gen Z said they cared about inflation and avoiding new wars. Trump has delivered the highest inflation in three years and started a war with Iran that we can’t seem to get out of. They feel betrayed, and they are not coming back.
The midterms are less than six months away. And the coalition the President needed to keep his majority is shedding the very voters who put him over the top in 2024. And rightly so. This administration has not only been a disaster, it has betrayed the very voters who gave him a chance. And every 2028 presidential hopeful, on both sides of the aisle, needs to come to recognize the anger throughout the country with this pattern. Politicians never deliver for the people who put them in office. They just focus on pleasing their base. And until that changes, the decline in trust for our democracy and wild swings between elections will continue.
Well folks, that is the show for today, and that is the week. Thanks for joining. Have a great weekend, and I will see you back here on Monday.
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