U.S. Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a retired Navy combat pilot and NASA astronaut who now sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, escalated his long-running campaign against what he calls Washington’s culture of self-enrichment on Tuesday, September 15, 2026, declaring in a post on X that President Donald Trump is “the most corrupt president we’ve ever had, and it’s not even close.” The 8:30 p.m. post came in direct response to a Bloomberg investigation published that morning documenting the scale of Trump’s personal stock trading since returning to office.
Kelly’s post read, in its entirety:
“Donald Trump is the most corrupt president we’ve ever had, and it’s not even close.”
The senator’s statement was posted directly in response to Bloomberg’s report, titled “Trump Has Made More Trades Than All of Congress Combined,” which was published earlier that day at 8:00 a.m. Central time. The Bloomberg piece found that Trump has personally traded more securities than every sitting member of Congress combined since he returned to the White House — even as he publicly champions a stock-trading ban for lawmakers that carves out an exemption for himself.
According to the Bloomberg analysis, Trump has made nearly 29,000 securities trades over roughly 17 months in office. The report noted that a stock-purchasing ban passed by House Republicans in July applies only to members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children, leaving the president — who has uniquely broad access to classified intelligence and the power to move entire sectors of the economy with an executive order or a single social media post — free to continue trading without restriction.
Bloomberg’s reporting also included on-the-record comment from Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna, who told a two-day GOP convention in Dallas last week that “the American people deserve to know that those they elect to public office actually serve the American people and not their own wallets.” The White House, for its part, declined to comment on whether Trump should be subject to a presidential trading ban, though spokesman Davis Ingle told Bloomberg the president’s portfolio is “independently managed by third-party financial institutions using computer-based model portfolios that replicate indexes like the Schwab 1000,” and that “neither President Trump nor any member of his family has any ability to direct, influence, or provide input regarding how the portfolio is invested or when investments are bought or sold.”
Kelly’s Tuesday post was not his first time raising the issue publicly, and it fits a pattern the senator has built over more than a year of statements accusing the administration of self-enrichment. In June 2026, Kelly posted on X that “the President just made thousands of stock trades — and then he turned around and made decisions that shifted those companies’ bottom lines,” and argued in an accompanying video that some officials with access to non-public information are “clearly trading on information they have” well “before the public ever sees certain things.”
The Arizona senator has also taken his criticism directly to cable news. In a late-August appearance on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront,” Kelly said the “corruption that this administration is participating [in] is unprecedented,” adding that Trump “spends a lot of time on trying to make himself richer, his family,” while everyday Americans “can’t afford to put gas in their car” and “can’t afford rent.”
Earlier in the year, in a wide-ranging interview on PBS’ “Overheard with Evan Smith,” Kelly went further, describing the scale of alleged wrongdoing as demanding formal investigation. “The amount of corruption we’ve seen out of this administration, it’s unprecedented. It’s outrageous. It’s really obscene, what we are seeing,” Kelly said, citing “the pay for play, the, ‘donate to my ballroom,’ million-dollar fees at Mar-a-Lago, crypto-scams, meme coins, businesses around the world.” He added, “There needs to be investigations for the most serious stuff. I think there has to be. These people need to be held accountable.”
A Legislative Record Predating Tuesday’s Post
Kelly’s criticism is backed by a legislative record on the issue that stretches back years. Alongside Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Kelly has repeatedly introduced the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act, which would require members of Congress and their immediate family members to place their portfolios into qualified blind trusts or divest entirely. The two senators most recently reintroduced the bill in May 2025 alongside Senators Michael Bennet, Tammy Duckworth, Raphael Warnock, Brian Schatz, Ben Ray Luján, and Tammy Baldwin. “As Americans work hard to keep up with rising costs, the last thing they should have to worry about is whether their elected representatives are using inside information to make a quick buck,” Kelly said at the time. “This isn’t rocket science: the only way to stop insider trading in Congress is to stop members of Congress from trading stocks. Period.”
Kelly’s office has also emphasized that the senator holds himself to standards he wants applied government-wide. According to his Senate office, Kelly is one of only a handful of members of Congress who has placed his own assets in a Qualified Blind Trust, releases his official Senate schedule publicly, and does not accept corporate PAC contributions to his campaign.
In April 2025, Kelly joined Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, Ron Wyden, and other colleagues in formally calling on the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate potential market manipulation and insider trading tied to Trump’s tariff announcements, arguing in a joint statement that “it is unconscionable that as American families are concerned about their financial security during this economic crisis entirely manufactured by the President, insiders may have actively profited from the market volatility and potentially perpetrated financial fraud on the American public.”
Trump’s Response to Past Scrutiny of His Trading
Trump has previously dismissed similar criticism from lawmakers of both parties. When Republican Senator Josh Hawley introduced legislation that would have extended a congressional stock-trading ban to cover the president and vice president, Trump attacked his fellow Republican on his own social media platform, calling Hawley a “pawn” who was “playing right into the dirty hands of the Democrats” and warning that “real Republicans” would not want to see him “TARGETED” because of “the ‘whims’ of a second-tier Senator.” Hawley was ultimately the only Republican to vote for his own bill in committee, where other Republicans dismissed it as a “publicity show.”
Trump has also called for investigations into the trading activity of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband, whose portfolio has drawn scrutiny — and inspired trading-tracker apps and exchange-traded funds — for consistently outperforming the broader market. Asked directly by reporters in July about his own trading activity, Trump defended it by pointing to overall market performance: “You know why I’m profiting? Because the stock market’s going up. Everybody’s profiting.”
The Bloomberg Findings in Detail
Bloomberg’s Tuesday report detailed specific examples cited as illustrating potential conflicts of interest. In the first three months of the year, Trump bought as much as $1.38 million in DoorDash Inc. stock; the following month, DoorDash was brought in to deliver a McDonald’s order to the White House as part of a publicity event promoting tax breaks for tipped workers. CNN has also reported that Trump publicly touted the stock of Nvidia, Tesla, and at least 19 other companies within a week of purchasing stakes in them.
Kedric Payne of the Campaign Legal Center told Bloomberg that even trades made without access to non-public information raise ethical concerns, since officeholders “still create the appearance of a conflict of interest because they can still influence the value of the stock through their official duties.” Payne also noted that any presidential trading ban would be far harder to enforce than restrictions on Congress, since “it’s questionable how the DOJ would be able to effectively enforce it against the president.”
Broad Public Support, Narrow Legislative Path
Public polling cited in the Bloomberg report found that roughly three-quarters of Americans believe elected officials should not be permitted to trade individual stocks while in office, according to a May 2026 Economist/YouGov survey of 757 U.S. adults, with slightly fewer supporting an outright ban. Kelly’s office has cited even higher backing for his own bill, pointing to polling that found 86 percent support for the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act, including majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike.
Despite that support, the legislative outlook remains uncertain. The House-passed stock-trading ban was attached to a voter-identification measure that Senate Democrats have described as a poison pill, and enforcement of existing conflict-of-interest law — the 2012 STOCK Act — has been criticized as weak, with financial penalties starting at just $200 per violation. Senator Jon Ossoff has separately announced a bipartisan agreement in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that would ban members of Congress from buying stocks immediately and require full divestiture, including by the president and vice president, beginning in 2027 — a provision that, if enacted, would represent the first legislative language extending such a ban to the presidency itself.
As of Wednesday morning, neither the White House nor Trump’s campaign had issued a public response to Kelly’s post.