(AFP) – Democrats accused US President Donald Trump of corruption on Friday after the disclosure of major stock market transactions carried out in his name, although his son denied there was wrongdoing.
“The President’s corruption is a national security disaster,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote on X. Warren referred to the purchase of shares in Nvidia — the maker of advanced chips used by AI companies. Trump allowed the company to sell products to China, leading to a temporary boost in its stock price.
“Trump brought the NVIDIA CEO on his trip to China to lobby (Chinese President) Xi Jinping to buy advanced AI chips, even though it would create a US national security threat,” Warren also wrote. “It turns out Trump also bought millions in NVIDIA’s stock.”
The president’s eldest son, Eric Trump, who runs the family business alongside his brother Donald Trump Jr., denied wrongdoing. “All of our assets are invested in a blind trust by the largest financial institutions in broad market indexes. To suggest that individual stocks are being bought or sold, at the discretion of any member of the Trump family, would be a lie and blatantly false,” Eric Trump wrote on X.
Eric Trump does not hold an official government position; nevertheless, he accompanied the president on his trip to China this week. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was also part of the trip.
Democratic Illinois Governor JB Pritzker called Trump “the most corrupt president in American history” in a post on X. Since his return to power, Trump has handed over management of the family business to his sons, with looser ethical constraints than during his first term. Previously, he had imposed a moratorium on his family’s foreign investments, which he did not renew.
The Trump Organization recently announced the construction of a hotel complex in Tbilisi, Georgia. The president himself blurs the lines, for example, by hosting diplomatic events at his private residences.
The documents released Thursday in Donald Trump’s name detail transactions whose total value exceeds $200 million and involve corporate heavyweights such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Boeing. The financial publication Forbes estimated the president’s personal fortune at $6.5 billion in March 2026, an increase of $1.4 billion in the space of a year.
© 2024 AFP
