[Salon] The Receipts of a Looted Swamp




Inside the President's Multi-Billion-Dollar Self-Dealing
͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more

The Receipts of a Looted Swamp

Inside the President's Multi-Billion-Dollar Self-Dealing

May 19
 
READ IN APP
 

When Donald Trump first burst onto the political scene, his most resonant battle cry was a promise to “drain the swamp,” a phrase that resonated with tens of millions of people, even those who may not have supported him.

But fast-forward to May 2026, and it’s become clearer than ever that (surprise!) he didn’t drain the swamp — he bought the real estate, built a luxury resort on it, and started charging the American taxpayer admission.

This blatant, out-in-the-open monetization of the presidency is precisely why we are seeing a massive erosion in his support. The corruption is no longer a matter of partisan debate or speculative reporting; it is now laid bare in official government filings and brazen backdoor legal maneuvers. If anyone in your life still needs definitive proof that the presidency is being treated as a private equity firm, please share this with them.

Part I: The 113-Page Roadmap to Insider Trading

Just days ago, Trump filed an official government ethics disclosure known as Form 278-T, a Periodic Transaction Report. Though he filed it months late and was forced to pay late fees, the document provides an unprecedented look at how official policy is being leveraged for private profit.

The form catalogs over 3,600 individual stock trades made during the first quarter of this year alone, totaling an estimated value of up to $750 million in personal trading volume. A close look at the timing reveals a pattern of a sitting president actively trading securities in companies directly affected by his own immediate policy decisions:

  • Nvidia: Trump bought millions of dollars in Nvidia stock right around the time he agreed to reverse U.S. national security restrictions on selling advanced AI chips to China. Days later, he flew Nvidia’s CEO to China on Air Force One, cleared 10 Chinese firms to buy the chips, and watched the stock price climb 26%.

  • Boeing: After purchasing millions in Boeing stock, Trump brought Boeing’s CEO on that same official trip to China, directly securing a deal to sell 200 airplanes to the Chinese government.

  • TikTok: Trump heavily invested in Oracle at the exact same time he personally brokered their highly controversial deal to acquire TikTok.

  • Defense and Crypto: He bought into Palantir while they actively competed for billions in government contracts, and snatched up crypto stocks while publicly championing the so-called “Clarity Act” — a bill the crypto industry is heavily lobbying for.

  • Micro-Trading the News: In January, during a severe national egg shortage, Trump bought into Cal-Maine Foods (the nation’s largest egg producer) and sold it for a massive profit two months later. In February, he bought millions in Dell stock and immediately used his platform to tell the public to “go out and buy a Dell,” sending the stock surging 24%.

Historically, modern presidents have utilized independent blind trusts or liquidated their assets to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. Trump has completely shattered this norm, reportedly telling critics:

“I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to.”

As a result, Forbes estimates his net worth has surged 60% since he returned to office, now sitting at $6.3 billion.

Part II: The $1.8 Billion Treasury Heist

If using the executive office to game the stock market wasn’t enough, we just witnessed what can only be described as a coordinated raid on the U.S. Treasury.

Earlier this year, Trump filed a legally baseless, $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS — an agency that he, as head of the Executive Branch, completely controls. It was a farce from the start: a president suing his own government so he could effectively negotiate a multi-billion-dollar settlement with himself. We warned you about it here:

When a judge-appointed team of independent legal experts reviewed the case and concluded it was absolute nonsense that should be thrown out of court, Trump’s team didn’t wait for the hammer to fall. They voluntarily dropped the suit because they had already engineered a backdoor settlement with the Justice Department, which doesn’t require judicial approval.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the creation of a $1.776 (🙄) billion “anti-weaponization” fund carved directly out of taxpayer money. Disguised as a fund to compensate “victims of lawfare,” this is a massive, unchecked slush fund. It will be run by five political loyalists appointed by the Attorney General and removable by the president. They will have total, unilateral discretion to hand out our tax dollars to Trump and his political allies with:

  • Zero court oversight

  • Zero public transparency

  • Zero legal accountability

As a matter of law, the Attorney General has a fiduciary duty to protect taxpayer money from fraudulent claims. Instead, the highest law enforcement officers in the country have entered into a structural conspiracy to treat the U.S. Treasury like a campaign piggy bank.

Part III: The Turning Tide and How We Fight Back

The sheer, unapologetic audacity of this self-dealing is exactly why the ground is shifting beneath Trump’s feet. Everyday Americans are realizing that treating national policy like a series of personal business transactions is the textbook definition of corruption — and the opposite of what he promised to do.

Watchdogs have sprung into action, filing amicus briefs and demanding absolute transparency. But to fix a system this compromised, we need structural guardrails.

Let's ACTUALLY Drain the Swamp

We must flood the phone lines of our elected representatives and demand immediate legislative action:

  1. Pass the Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act: This bill would permanently block a sitting President, Vice President, and their immediate families from collecting any settlement payouts from the United States government.

  2. Enact a Total Stock Trading Ban: We must support a bipartisan expansion of congressional trading bans to explicitly include the President and Vice President, making it illegal to trade individual securities while in office.

  3. Restore the Office of Government Ethics (OGE): We must codify strict independence and subpoena power for the OGE so that a president cannot simply fire its director and install political loyalists to erase late fees and ignore conflicts.

The swamp wasn’t drained; it was weaponized for profit. Share this information, sound the alarm with your neighbors, and call your representatives today. The U.S. Treasury belongs to the American people, not the president’s personal portfolio.

And that shouldn’t be considered a conservative or a progressive belief — but an All-American one.

Leave a comment

Help us fuel lawsuits against Donald Trump’s abuses of power and break through to disengaged Americans. You’ll never be required to donate in order to be part of Bright America, but an investment of ANY size adds up to a huge impact when enough of us put some money where our minds and hopes are.

Invest in Bright America

 
Share
 
 
Like
Comment
Restack
 

© 2026 Bright America
P.O. Box 245, The Plains, VA 20198
Unsubscribe

Start writing



This archive was generated by a fusion of Pipermail (Mailman edition) and MHonArc.