While ordinary Americans watch gas prices climb, someone with a lot of money—and apparently the right connections—appears to have made a fortune in a single minute.
On the morning of March 22, just before 7 a.m. Eastern time, oil futures markets lit up. In a single 60-second window, between 6:49 and 6:50 a.m., nearly 6,200 oil contracts were traded with a total value around $580 million. The average volume for that time period over the preceding five days had been barely more than a tenth of that—a mere 700 contracts.
There was no public news at that moment. No economic data had just dropped. It was a quiet morning. But clearly, someone knew something.
Fifteen minutes later, President Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that the U.S. was holding “productive conversations” with Iran. Oil prices immediately fell, and stock futures jumped. Anyone holding those positions would have profited on both ends of the trade at exactly the right moment.
Economist Paul Krugman said the trading “was especially bizarre because there were no major publicly available news items to drive sudden big market transactions,” adding that the most straightforward explanation is that someone close to Trump knew what he was about to announce.
Krugman also raised the question of whether the trading constitutes a national security risk, because when insiders bet on secret government plans, those trades can effectively signal the U.S. military’s intentions through the markets.
“We have another word for situations in which people with access to confidential information regarding national security—such as plans to bomb or not to bomb another country—exploit that information for profit,” Krugman wrote in a Substack post. “That word is treason.”
CBS News business analyst Jill Schlesinger, a former options trader, put it more plainly: “Does it seem fair that someone is trading and making money and profiting on information that you and I don’t have? Yeah, that kind of stinks.”
This wasn’t a one-time event, though. According to Axios, the pattern has repeated itself across both traditional markets and prediction platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi. Before the U.S. launched its war on Iran on Feb. 28, a surge of over 150 Polymarket accounts placed bets predicting a U.S. strike.
A similar pattern appeared before the Venezuela operation. One trader reportedly made $436,000 profit on a $32,000 bet on the exact timing of President Nicolás Maduro’s kidnapping.
Then, of course, there is also the traditional war profiteering. The people around Trump are prospering thanks to his wars.
Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald, Jr., have invested in drone companies competing for Pentagon contracts. Jared Kushner—serving as one of Trump’s Iran envoys—is seeking to raise billions in capital for his private equity fund from Persian Gulf governments entangled in the conflict.
Friends who previously ran afoul of the law are now free to get back in the game, too. Over his two terms in office, Trump has so far granted clemency to more than 70 donors and allies convicted of fraud, including one pardoned after his family donated $3.5 million to a Trump super PAC.
The White House denies wrongdoing. Spokesperson Kush Desai said the administration does not tolerate officials profiting off insider knowledge, and White House counsel David Warrington told Axios that “the president performs his constitutional duties in an ethically sound manner.”
The agencies meant to investigate such claims, however, have been gutted, so there is little reason to expect any real probes into this corruption will be coming soon.
The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section—created after Watergate to prosecute corrupt officials—was reduced from 36 lawyers to just two and stripped of authority to file new cases. The administration also canceled 159 federal enforcement actions against 166 companies, more than 30 of which had donated to Trump’s inauguration or White House events. Reuters reported that the SEC’s top enforcement official resigned after agency leadership blocked her from pursuing cases touching Trump’s circle.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., called what’s happening “mind-blowing corruption.” Democrats say they are laying the groundwork for investigations if they win the House in November.
Still, it’s worth asking whether this is purely a Trump problem. Congressional stock trading—members buying and selling shares in industries they oversee—has been a bipartisan issue for years. The revolving door between Wall Street and Washington long predates this administration. The financial system, by its nature, rewards those with better information and faster access to it.
What’s different now is the scale and the open dismantling of whatever enforcement existed. Years ago, Martha Stewart went to prison for saving $45,000 on a well-timed stock tip. Whoever placed $580 million in oil bets 15 minutes before a presidential announcement will likely face no investigation at all—not because the evidence is thin, but because the people who would normally investigate have been reassigned or pushed out.
Now, with Trump continuing to swing back and forth between claims that a ceasefire agreement with Iran is imminent at one moment and pledges to destroy Iranian civilization at the next, there are still plenty of opportunities for those in the know to score windfall profits.
Insider trading is as old as the stock market itself, but it can be highly self-damaging to the system. The rules of the free market forbid it; U.S. trading laws say it’s illegal. When individuals or firms use information that’s not publicly known to guide their trades, they undermine market integrity and investor confidence.
Of course, what’s good for the system isn’t always top-of-mind for the individual swindler. Liberal economists see a broken rule, while a Marxist perspective would suggest that insider trading is unfettered capitalism doing precisely what it’s designed to: concentrating wealth into fewer and fewer hands.
It’s up to the capitalist state to step in and stabilize the system, but that’s not happening now. The gap between who gets held accountable and who doesn’t is not new. Under Trump, it’s just gotten a lot harder to ignore.
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