Last week, Donald Trump surprised much of the world with a 90-day “pause” to much of his agenda on trade tariffs. The major Wall Street indexes had been falling off a cliff in response to the president’s trade agenda, but investors were delighted to see the Republican back off, and markets immediately soared.
It wasn’t long, however, before many observers started to take note of the timing. A few hours before he made the announcement, the president — who had publicly insisted that his trade tariffs were “here to stay” and would “never change” — published a related item to his social media platform. “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” he wrote. It came four minutes after Trump also wrote, “BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well.”
Evidently, one of Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill also thought it was a good time to buy. The New York Times reported:
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, disclosed on Monday that she had purchased between tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stock on April 8 and 9, the day before and the day of President Trump’s announcement that he was pausing a sweeping set of global tariffs, a pivot that sent the stock market soaring out of a sizable slump. Ms. Greene bought between about $21,000 and $315,000 in stocks on those days. The day before Mr. Trump’s move, she also dumped between $50,000 and $100,0000 in Treasury bills, according to required public disclosures made to the House.
These disclosure documents are public information, which have been published online. In this instance, they show the right-wing congresswoman made nearly two dozen trades — ranging from $1,001 to $15,000 — the day before and the day of her presidential ally’s “pause” announcement.
When the Times sought comment from the Georgia Republican — who chairs a DOGE panel on the House Oversight Committee — she declined.
Shortly after the news broke, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries sat down with MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, who sought his reaction to the developments.
“So many of these people are crooks, liars and frauds, and Marjorie Taylor Greene is, of course, Exhibit A,” the New York Democrat said. “We are seeing corruption unfold before us in real time. And House Democrats and Senate Democrats are going to partner together to make sure we, of course, shine a spotlight on these issues. One, we do need to change the law so that sitting members of Congress cannot trade stock. Period. Full stop. And until we get to that point, we obviously have to continue to highlight why this is problematic.”
Jeffries is hardly alone on this. Around the time he was on MSNBC, one of his fellow House Democrats, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a longtime critic of lawmakers being able to make stock trades, delivered remarks to a sizable crowd in Idaho, where she addressed the Times’ report.
“We saw Majorie Taylor Greene buy that dip,” the New York Democrat said. “How much did you make? How much did you make off of people’s despair? How much did you make off of that panic? How much did you make off of that suffering? No more. We can’t accept it.”
In the other chamber, meanwhile, the morning after Trump’s move, Democratic Sens. Adam Schiff of California and Ruben Gallego of Arizona wrote to the Office of Government Ethics demanding an investigation into possible market manipulation. A day later, an even larger group of Senate Democrats appealed to the Securities and Exchange Commission, calling on the agency to launch an investigation into “potential violations of federal securities laws by President Trump and his affiliates.”
I don’t imagine we’ve heard the last of this. Watch this space.
