Donald Trump’s decision to wade into the debate over a congressional stock-trading ban could end up making things awkward for some of his closest allies in the House and Senate.
While stock trades by members of Congress and their families have long been controversial, the sustained push for new restrictions on lawmakers is new.
Supported by members of both parties, the effort to push back against an image of corruption and decadence in the chamber is growing in popularity particularly among younger members. But the prospect of making it to the president’s desk with legislation that would ban congressional stock trading has now caused Trump to weigh in.
The issue was glaring as he went on a late-night rant on Truth Social Saturday night against Democratic former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — after reports about one of his own MAGA faithful, Marjorie Taylor Greene cashing in on a stock deal tied to an ICE contractor.
“Crooked Nancy Pelosi, and her very “interesting” husband, beat every Hedge Fund in 2024. In other words, these two very average “minds” beat ALL of the Super Geniuses on Wall Street, thousands of them. It’s all INSIDE iNFORMATION! Is anybody looking into this??? She is a disgusting degenerate, who Impeached me twice, on NO GROUNDS, and LOST! How are you feeling now, Nancy???” he raged in his posting.
Pelosi’s office hadn’t responded publicly as of Sunday morning.
Taylor Greene has drawn criticism after she purchased stock in Peter Thiel-owned Palantir in April, three days before the company won an ICE contract.
The company’s stock has since surged. That’s not even the first time this year Greene, who maintains that all of her trades are managed without her input by a financial adviser, has been called out by stock-trading watchdogs for highly-lucrative trading activity.
“After many successful years of running my own business, I ran for Congress to bring that mindset to Washington. Now that I’m proudly serving the people of Northwest Georgia, I have signed a fiduciary agreement to allow my financial advisor to control my investments,” Greene told the fact-checker site Snopes in May.
“All of my investments are reported with full transparency. I refuse to hide my stock trades in a blind trust like many others do,” she added. “I learned about my Palantir trades when I saw it in the media.”
The California Democrat Pelosi, once her party’s leader in the House of Representatives, is one of a few senior members of the chamber who has come out publicly against restrictions on congressional stock trading.
“We’re a free market economy,” Pelosi said in 2021. “They should be able to participate in that.”
But her stance shifted over time and earlier in 2025 she came out in favor of legislation that would restrict such activity. The HONEST Act, a bill sponsored by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, advanced through a Senate committee in late July.
“While I appreciate the creativity of my Republican colleagues in drafting legislative acronyms, I welcome any serious effort to raise ethical standards in public service. The HONEST Act, as amended, rightly applies its stock trading ban not only to Members of Congress, but now to the President and Vice President as well. I strongly support this legislation and look forward to voting for it on the Floor of the House.”
Pelosi supports the bill, despite it previously bearing her name: Hawley originally dubbed it the the “PELOSI Act”, a reference to the trading activity primarily conducted by Pelosi’s husband Paul. She is one of the wealthier members of Congress; her family controls more than $127m in publicly-traded assets watched by stock-trading analysts.
Its advancement drew opposition from Trump, which Hawley characterized in a rare public shot at his own colleagues as the result of Republican senators supposedly having called up the president and lied to him about what was in the bill.
“I wonder why Hawley would pass a Bill that Nancy Pelosi is in absolute love with — He is playing right into the dirty hands of the Democrats,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in late July.
Hawley responded, telling reporters: “He said, senators, I don’t know who, had called and told him yesterday afternoon that the bill had been changed at the last minute and would force him to sell all of his assets, sell Mar-a-Lago, sell his properties. So, I said, ‘Well, that’s just false. I mean, it explicitly exempts you and all your assets.’”
The senator’s response referred to a provision stuck in aimed explicitly at winning Trump over. The ban affects future presidents and vice presidents, but not Trump or his no. 2, JD Vance.
It’s unclear whether Hawley will succeed in winning over the president, but the ban at least has the potential to make it through both chambers of Congress with bipartisan support.
Members of Congress on key committees are often scrutinized for their trading activity as in some cases lawmakers are privy to information that is not yet public or widely known, but could still affect markets.
Some members of Congress were caught up in a scandal over such activity in 2020, at the onset of the Covid pandemic, when they triggered selloffs of their own stock shares ahead of a market collapse.
One former North Carolina senator, a Republican, sold more than $1 million in stock one week before the market crashed.
