The Video Above Was Right. It Got Worse.

I recorded the video above in late April. The core argument was simple: when you concentrate the power to start, pause, escalate, and de-escalate a war in one person — and that person announces every move on social media — insider trading stops being a scandal. It becomes a structural feature. A design consequence.

Everything that’s happened since has confirmed that thesis so precisely it almost feels scripted.

Start with the trades. When I recorded this, the number everyone was talking about was $580 million in oil futures, moved sixteen minutes before Trump’s March 23 Truth Social post pausing strikes on Iran’s power grid. That was alarming. What happened next was worse. On April 7, hours before Trump announced a ceasefire, traders placed roughly $950 millionbetting oil would drop. It did. On the same day, a cluster of brand-new Polymarket wallets — several created minutesbefore the announcement — collectively netted over $600,000 on ceasefire contracts. One account turned $13,200 into $467,515. Another wallet was created twelve minutes before Trump’s post. The DOJ and CFTC eventually opened probes into at least four sets of trades totaling more than $2.6 billion. As of today, no senior figure has been charged. One person has been arrested: a U.S. Army soldier linked to the Venezuela Polymarket bets. That’s it.

But the real escalation — the thing that makes the original script look almost quaint — came on May 14, when Trump’s Office of Government Ethics filing landed. A hundred and thirteen pages. Three thousand, six hundred and forty-two securities transactions in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Between $220 million and $750 million in cumulative volume. Roughly sixty trades per trading day. In an account nominally managed by his children through third-party brokers, but in his name.

No president has done this. Not since Lyndon Johnson established the presidential blind trust in 1963. Every president since — Carter, Reagan, both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, even Trump’s own first term — either used a blind trust, held index funds, or in Carter’s case, sold the farm. Literally. And here was a sitting president running what Fortune described as an actively managed portfolio in companies directly subject to his administration’s regulatory and policy decisions: Nvidia, Oracle, Meta, Goldman Sachs, Palantir, defense contractors. He bought millions in Dell stock starting February 10; on May 8, he publicly praised Dell at a White House event, and the stock jumped twelve percent. He bought Oracle while his administration was helping the company secure the TikTok deal. He loaded up on defense stocks as the war he started was sending their share prices skyward.

But here’s the detail that should haunt you. Fortune obtained trading records showing that while Trump was publicly telling Americans the Iran war would end “soon,” his personal account was doing the opposite — systematically rotating out of growth stocks and into gold, Treasuries, and cash. Safe haven assets. The portfolio was hedging against the war its owner was prosecuting. On March 2, the first trading day of the war, the account bought Newmont, the gold miner. On March 4, the day Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, it bought Treasury bond ETFs. The account’s positioning told a different story than the president’s mouth.

The White House response was, characteristically, both technically accurate and substantively meaningless: all trades were executed by third-party institutions with “sole and exclusive authority,” and neither the president nor his family plays any role in “selecting, directing, or approving” specific investments. Richard Painter, a former Bush ethics lawyer who reviewed the filing, said he’d gone through every president’s records. None of them traded stocks while in office. Not one.

And now, one week ago, the ceasefire collapsed. On July 8, Trump declared it “over“ at a NATO summit in Turkey. Oil surged above $80. The FTSE dropped 1.7 percent in a single session. And the entire cycle that this video describes — the announcement, the market swing, the question of who knew first — resets. Again. The U.S. struck ninety targets across Iran. Iran retaliated against Kuwait and Bahrain. Ships were attacked in the Strait of Hormuz. And somewhere, on some exchange, at some hour before the public knew what was coming, somebody was almost certainly positioned to profit. Again.

Meanwhile, the enforcement landscape is, if anything, worse than when I recorded the video. The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section — created after Watergate — was reduced from thirty-six lawyers to two. The SEC’s top enforcement official resigned after being blocked from pursuing cases touching Trump’s circle. The CFTC’s enforcement actions have dropped by more than two-thirds since 2024. The legislation exists on paper — the DEATH BETS Act, the ETHICS Act, bills with forty co-sponsors and stern letters attached — but Congress still hasn’t managed to pass any of it. The same Congress that couldn’t summon the votes to invoke the War Powers Resolution still can’t summon the votes to ban the president from trading stocks in companies he regulates. Meanwhile, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America just posted record quarterly profits from trading revenues generated by this exact volatility.

In the video, I quote Trump saying “I found out nobody cared.” I called it a rational calculation about enforcement probability. He tested the norm, found it undefended, and kept going. The 113-page ethics filing is what that looks like at scale. It’s not even hidden. It’s filed with the Office of Government Ethics, for anyone to read. It just doesn’t matter, because the people who could enforce consequences have been removed, defunded, or captured.

The argument in this video hasn’t aged. It’s aged into the present tense.