‘A huge problem’: Trump has traded more stocks than all of Congress combined. A Bush-era ethics lawyer explains why you should worry

President Donald Trump has made more securities trades since returning to office than every member of Congress combined.

According to a Bloomberg analysis published this week, he has made roughly 28,700 in 17 months, or about 80 trades every market day

It's a new habit of Trump's. In his first term, Trump's financial disclosures consisted mostly of his real estate and privately held businesses.

For his second term, the periodic reports he filed through early 2026 showed an account buying municipal and corporate bonds—more than $100 million by August 2025 and more than $337 million in all—along with bank preferred securities and bond ETFs.

The stock trading surfaced in May of this year, when a first-quarter filing listed roughly 3,600 transactions in 90 days. Then the annual disclosure, released June 30 at nearly a thousand pages, showed more than 21,000 trades in 2025, worth between $600 million and $1.86 billion, at 85 per market day. Trump lists eight separate investment accounts but doesn't give any indication of which institutions manage them. "I believe that that is a huge problem," Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush and now teaches securities law at the University of Minnesota, told Fortune . "I've gone through every president. I don't think we've had any president trade in the stock market."

Since Lyndon Johnson, essentially every president has used a blind trust, held index funds, or just owned Treasuries. Jimmy Carter, for example, put the family peanut business in a blind trust that eventually sold it.

However, Trump's portfolio is handled differently. In May, after the stock trades appeared, White House spokesman Davis Ingle told Fortune the assets are held in a trust managed by the president's children. Eric Trump posted that any suggestion a family member was buying individual stocks "would be a lie and blatantly false."

"There's a financial conflict of interest if he has an ownership interest in the account," Painter said. "It doesn't matter who manages it."

In a statement, the White House's Ingle told Fortune that third-party financial institutions independently manage the portfolio through "computer-based model portfolios that automatically replicate recognized indexes, such as the Schwab 1000."

He did not answer questions about which institutions manage the portfolio or why the White House described a family trust in May. "There are no conflicts of interest," the statement said.

Fortune's review of the president's first-quarter filing in May found the account bought up to $1.38 million of DoorDash stock; in April, Trump had DoorDash deliver a McDonald's order to the White House for a tipped-worker tax event.