BOTH ETHICS BILLS DRAW A FAMILY LINE AND HE IS OUTSIDE BOTH
Bloomberg published a count on Tuesday morning. Nearly 29,000 securities trades by the President between January 20, 2025 and June 30, 2026, more than every member of Congress put together, an average of about eighty trades every market day. Their line, and it is the one that matters: he is the only US president this century to disclose active trading of individual stocks.
The documents behind that are public and almost nobody opens them. A president files OGE Form 278e once a year and OGE Form 278-T when he trades. Both sit on a government server in scanned PDFs.
The 2025 annual runs 847 pages. It was received by the Office of Government Ethics on June 29 and certified the next day, after a 45-day extension, and it records late filing fees paid on transactions that had not been reported when they should have been.
One periodic report covers May 5 to May 18 of this year. Two weeks. About 760 transactions across 37 pages. Amazon bought on May 5 in the one-to-five-million band. Apple the same day, same band. Tesla sold on May 11. DoorDash sold on May 18.
Read Bloomberg’s methodology note before repeating the comparison, because they were straight about its limits and nobody quoting the headline has passed it on. They used optical character recognition and AI to digitize the forms. Sixteen members of Congress filed on paper, some handwritten, and they include some of the most frequent traders. Not all members filed at all. Trades without clear dates were dropped. Bloomberg says plainly that the figures may undercount.
That cuts one way for the President and the other way for Congress, and it does not rescue the comparison. The gap is not close enough for a soft denominator to close it. But the number is a floor on both sides, not a measurement, and anybody putting 29,000 in a headline should say so.
Now put it next to the two ethics bills Congress spent this year on.
The stock-purchasing ban the House passed in July covers members of Congress, their spouses and their dependent children. It does not cover the President.
The CLARITY ethics title, the provision that killed the crypto bill on Tuesday afternoon, covers the official and the spouse. This desk read it. The word family does not appear in that bill. The word child appears twice, both times inside definitions of illicit use.
So Congress wrote two ethics rules this year and drew the family line in two different places. One reaches a lawmaker’s dependent children. The other stops at a spouse. Neither reaches the man doing the trading, and he has endorsed the one that exempts him.
There is a defensible version of each line on its own. A stock ban and a crypto-holdings ban are different instruments with different reach, and reasonable people draw those differently. What is hard to defend is that nobody drawing either line has explained why they are in different places, or why the office with the most market-moving power in the country sits outside both.
The filings are on a government server. They are long, they are badly scanned, and they are the only place any of this is actually written down.
Updated September 15, 7:31 PM ET. An earlier version said the disclosures are not SEC filings and that a president does not file with the SEC. Both statements are true, but neither Bloomberg nor the post that prompted this story had said otherwise, so the sentences argued with nobody. They are gone, and the story now names the forms directly. It also carries the limits Bloomberg put on its own count — optical character recognition, sixteen members of Congress filing on paper, some members not filing at all, trades without clear dates dropped — and gives the window as January 20, 2025 to June 30, 2026 rather than seventeen months. No figure changed.