Corruption 2.0

A story last night on 60 minutes about insider trading on decisions of war and peace using the new generation of prediction markets started a remarkable 24 hour deluge of alarming and depressing information.

With that as a scene setter, today we learned that President Trump's stock trading, supposedly in a blind trust, made over 3600 stock trades in the first quarter of 2026, a rate over 300X his historical average. Stocks his account traded in include Palantir (critical to US war efforts in Venezuela, Iran, and elsewhere), Nvidia (U.S. manufacturer of the most advanced AI chips and recent attendee at the U.S.-China summit), Oracle (whose founder was awarded a sweetheart deal on the purchase of Tik Tok), Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and more, with a total value in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Also today, we learn of a $1.7B fund created as part of a settlement of President Trump's lawsuit against the IRS for the unauthorized disclosure of his tax returns (for which the offending individual is now serving 5 years in prison). In exchange for dropping the lawsuit against the IRS (plus two others), this fund has been set up to compensate "victims" of the "weaponization of the government" during the Biden Administration. With loose rules and opaque guidelines, many expect this money to be handed out to January 6 defendants and other "victims".

Lest anyone think this is a one-sided problem, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's stock market record from when she entered the House in 1987 to late 2025 showed a 16,930% rate of return over that period, more than 5 times as lucrative as the Dow Jones Average's return of 2,300% over the same period.

Apparently public service is returning to - and exceeding - the bad old days. What is it going to take to stop this?