Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey accused President Trump of running a “personal enrichment scheme” after a CNN investigation found the president promoted more than 20 companies on Truth Social within days of buying stock in those firms.
“This is textbook corruption,” Booker wrote on X. “Trump has been promoting more than 20 companies on Truth Social, just days after buying their stock. He ran on draining the swamp, but now he’s shamelessly turning the presidency into a personal enrichment scheme for himself and his family. We need to end this grift and significantly reform our institutions to prevent it from happening.”
Booker shared a CNN investigation that compared Trump’s Truth Social posts against roughly 21,000 financial transactions listed in his 2025 disclosure to the Office of Government Ethics, using artificial intelligence to flag overlaps before reporters manually confirmed each match. The investigation identified at least 44 stock purchases across 21 companies that were followed within about a week by a favorable Trump post about the company, its executives or its products.
Among the examples CNN cited, Trump bought between $200,000 and $500,000 of Nvidia stock in April 2025, then posted days later that the company’s planned U.S. supercomputer facilities would have “all necessary permits” expedited. In July 2025, Trump bought between $15,000 and $50,000 of American Eagle stock before posting that the retailer’s controversial ad campaign featuring actress Sydney Sweeney was “the hottest” and that its jeans were “flying off the shelves.” CNN also found that in March 2025, Trump bought at least $15,000 in stock in GE Aerospace, Eli Lilly and Apple before posting favorably about all three companies within days.
A White House spokesperson told CNN that Trump’s assets are “held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions” and that the president has never used his office for financial gain. CNN reported that the arrangement is not a blind trust, since Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. serves as trustee, meaning Trump can still be aware of his holdings even if he does not directly control individual trades.
Booker serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to his office’s official committee assignments page.
Booker’s call to “significantly reform our institutions” echoes a broader push in Congress to restrict stock trading by federal officials. The Halting Ownership and Non-Ethical Stock Transactions Act, known as the HONEST Act, would bar members of Congress, the president and the vice president from owning or trading individual stocks and would require divestiture of existing holdings, according to the bill’s official text on Congress.gov. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee reported the bill in December 2025, but it has not reached a floor vote in either chamber.
Trump’s most recent annual financial disclosure, filed with the Office of Government Ethics on June 30, reported more than $2.2 billion in income for 2025, up from roughly $600 million the year before, with cryptocurrency accounting for more than $1.4 billion of that total.
Neither the White House nor Trump has issued a direct public response to Booker’s statement.