President Donald Trump’s financial accounts saw nearly 40 times as many transactions in a month as those of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a Wall Street veteran with decades of experience.
Trump earlier this week disclosed 1,156 transactions made through accounts in his name in July, including 440 purchases and 716 sales, according to one report filed with the Office of Government Ethics. According to a, his transactions totaled a minimum of $79 million and a maximum of $270 million Assets Analysis of the report. The exact dollar amount involved in each trade was not disclosed.
In comparison, Bessent has only announced 29 transactions for all of 2025.
According to an Office of Government Ethics report, all of Bessent’s transactions were sales report. Several of the transactions involved his holdings in companies related to Key Square, the hedge fund he founded in 2015 and left to enter administration. Others involved selling individual shares in companies such as Verizon and Archer Daniels Midland. A JPMorgan Chase Bessent’s husband John Freeman’s share had also previously been mistakenly reported as a deposit account and adjusted, the report said.
Bessent agreed to divest assets that might conflict with his new role when he agreed to become finance minister.
As for Trump’s transactions, a White House spokesman previously said Assets The president’s assets are managed in a trust based on his children. The high number of transactions can now be attributed to “computer-based model portfolios from third-party providers that automatically replicate recognized indices such as the Schwab 1000,” said the spokesman told Assets.
The White House did not immediately respond AssetsPlease comment.
A federal conflict of interest law (18 U.S. Code 208) legally prohibits most federal officials from taking actions that affect personal financial interests. However, this does not apply to the President and Vice President. Trump’s trading volume has increased during his second term. A disclosure filed with the OGE revealed that the president’s accounts recorded more than 21,000 transactions during the year his first year back in office.
Of course, it is unusual for a president to remain the owner of an actively traded portfolio of individual securities while in office. Since Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, all modern presidents have either implemented a blind trust or limited their investments to non-conflicting assets such as diversified mutual funds. said Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, commented on this in 2017.
Just months before he resigned as OGE director during Trump’s first term, Shaub said in a speech at the Brookings Institution that Trump’s plan to manage his finances while in office “does not meet the standards that the best of his nominees meet and that every president has met over the last four decades.”
The scale of transactions arising from Trump’s accounts has also drawn criticism from politicians such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), who in a letter To Trump, he said: “The sheer scale of this trading activity and the timing of a series of transactions raises the question of whether you are using your knowledge of government activities, your official authority, or the giant megaphone provided by the presidency to make investments or move markets for your personal benefit…”
But Trump has since endorsed new restrictions on stock trading for members of Congress. The Trump administration said in July: “strongly supports“The Stop Insider Trading Act, which would ban members of Congress and their families from buying stocks in companies while in office. The bill was opposed by some Democratic lawmakers because it includes a provision that would impose new ID requirements for voting in federal elections.
Although the House passed the bill this summer, it is still being considered by the Senate. The bill’s restraint of trade would not apply to the president and vice president.