President Donald Trump at Trump Turnberry golf club in Scotland on July 28. (Andrew Harnik / Getty Images file)
President Donald Trump has purchased at least $103 million worth of corporate and municipal bonds since taking office in January, according to new filings from the Office of Government Ethics.
The documents, released late Tuesday night, show that Trump began the bond-buying spree one day after being sworn in on Jan. 20 and include debt sold by companies, local governments and entities that could be directly impacted by his sweeping agenda. All said, Trump made about 690 purchases from Jan. 21 through Aug. 1.
The active trading by a president of the United States is unprecedented and puts Trump in a direct position to benefit — or lose out — if any of the entities that own the bonds he’s purchased succeed or fail. It’s also another example of Trump pursuing business endeavors and transactions to increase his wealth while serving in office.
On Jan. 21, Trump purchased a bond belonging to the New York Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. A week later, Trump purchased another handful of bonds over consecutive days.
Those bonds belong to various municipal hospital facilities, airports, regional development funds and school districts from Florida to Alaska.
The filings do not provide exact purchase amounts, but instead show a broad dollar range for each transaction. The filings did not show any sales by Trump.
Trump’s buying continued at a steady clip for months, including bonds from megabanks Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Citigroup worth at least $100,000 each.
Trump’s direct ownership of bonds from three of the nation’s banking giants also comes as he considers an eventual replacement of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, and weeks after he nominated one of his top aides, Stephen Miran, to a seat on the Fed’s board. The Fed can directly affect a bank’s profit by lowering or raising interest rates, along with myriad regulatory actions. As a Fed governor, Miran would have a direct say in many of those actions.
The president’s purchases also included at least $500,000 of bonds each from chipmaker Qualcomm, mobile provider T-Mobile USA, Home Depot and UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest private health insurance company.
The filings also show that Trump purchased at least $250,001 of Meta’s bonds. CEO Mark Zuckerberg attended the president’s inauguration and made a $1 million donation to that event.
Likewise, Trump’s ownership in hundreds of municipal bonds puts him in line to benefit when those municipal entities pay back the debt and comes at a time when the administration has been tightly controlling the distribution of funds from the federal government to local and regional governments.
Trump’s net worth currently sits around $5.5 billion, according to the Forbes Billionaires List, up a staggering $3.2 billion since 2024.
Typically a president divests their financial assets before or shortly after entering office, but Trump has rejected that precedent and retained most of his empire since his first term in office.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
