Selling Yourself Short

A guy works at a company. He finds out, before anyone else, that next week's earnings report is bad. Really bad. The stock's going to fall the moment it goes public. He doesn't sell a single share of his own stock. Not one. He calls his brother. Tells him to sell now, before Friday. His brother sells. Saves himself a fortune. My guy never touches a dime of it. So here's the question. Did he break the law? You'd think no. He didn't personally gain anything. If the crime is profiting off information nobody else has, and he never profited, there's no crime to point to. The Supreme Court disagreed. Unanimously. In a case called Salman v. United States, the Court ruled that handing an advantage to someone whose win is also a win for you, using access nobody else in that room has, is legally the same thing as trading on it yourself and just giving away the winnings. You don't have to touch the money for it to be about you. Wanting the person you favor to win is benefit enough. Keep that ruling in your back pocket. Because there's a much bigger version of the exact same move happening right now, out of the most powerful office in the country, and almost nobody is calling it what it actually is. Now replace the brother with something bigger. On September 9th, in Dallas, Donald Trump stood on a stage and made a promise. Five thousand dollars, to every adult American citizen, funded by the government he currently runs. And that fund isn't Republican money. It's paid in by Democrats, Republicans, and everyone who belongs to neither, all of it pooled into one account. He's proposing to hand it out as a reward for keeping just one of those groups in power. He didn't stop there. He put a condition on it. His exact words: "Here is my promise: If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them... I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000." Not if the policy works. Not if the numbers add up. If his party wins the election. And when Fox News' own Laura Ingraham pushed him on exactly that, the day after: "Why not just give the money now?" "Because they can't... Democrats can't do it... with them it's negative growth, with us it's so positive... we're taking in $21 trillion... all because of tariffs." Let's stop on that number, because it isn't close. Actual tariff revenue this year, by Treasury's own accounting, is somewhere around $150 to $170 billion. He's overstating it by well over a hundred times. And that much smaller, real number isn't coming from foreign countries either. Tariffs get billed to the American company importing the goods. Independent research, including from the New York Federal Reserve, found that company passes most of that cost straight to you, at checkout. And a real piece of even that smaller number isn't the government's to spend. The Supreme Court ruled in February that the largest single category of these tariffs, the ones imposed under emergency powers, were never legal to charge in the first place. Over a hundred billion dollars of it has already had to be paid back. So follow the money all the way through. It was never foreign money. It was yours, collected a few cents at a time, every time you bought something with a hidden tariff sitting in the price, without anyone telling you that's what was happening. Now imagine someone picks your pocket without you noticing. Takes some of what's in there. Comes back later, hands a piece of it back to you, and says: this is a gift, but only if you do something for me first. You didn't get a gift. You got a portion of your own money back, with a string attached, still down everything he kept. Listen to that Ingraham answer again with that in mind. She didn't ask which party is better for growth. She asked why the check has to wait for a vote. He never answered that. He answered a different question. That's not a dodge you make by accident. That's what it sounds like when there's no policy answer to give. Nobody's charging him under Salman. That case is about stock trades, and no one seriously thinks a securities ruling reaches into the Oval Office. That's not the point. The point is the principle the Court used to get there. It doesn't matter whether you personally pocket the money. What matters is whether you used a position nobody else has access to, to hand an advantage to someone whose win is also a win for you. The Republican Party isn't Trump's brother. But its continued hold on Congress is his continued shield, his continued agenda, his continued grip on the office he's using right now to make this offer. Their win and his are the same win. So ask the honest version of the question people keep getting stuck on. Is this illegal? Almost certainly not, under any law anyone's actually pointed to. Legal experts can't even agree on that much. If this sounds like something the Constitution should already forbid, you're not wrong to think that. There's a clause built for exactly this instinct. It's called the Emoluments Clause, and its entire purpose is to stop a president from using the office to serve himself. Except it doesn't reach this. Not technically. The Emoluments Clause is about money landing in the president's own hands: a payment, a gift, a personal profit. Nobody's arguing Trump pockets a dime of this. So legally, it's a dead end, and if you stop there, it sounds like nothing happened at all. But remember the brother. The Court didn't need the tipper to profit either. It needed him to use privileged access to hand an edge to someone whose win was his win. That's not a coincidence. That's the same design flaw, twice. There's a federal law that comes even closer, and here's the leading argument for why even that one might not reach this: it's illegal to pay someone in exchange for how they vote. But it only reaches you if you're paying a specific person for their specific vote. Pay everyone the same amount, regardless of how any one of them votes, conditioned only on the outcome overall, and the statute's own text lets you walk straight through it. That's not the law failing by accident. It's a constitutional protection built up around ordinary campaign promises, elect me and I'll cut your taxes, being used as cover for something that isn't an ordinary campaign promise at all. Same protection, built to let good-faith politics through, stretched to cover something else. So no, this isn't illegal. But don't mistake "not illegal" for "not the thing the law was trying to stop." There's a difference between falling outside a law by accident, and being built, on purpose, to fall just outside it. This is the second kind. So who does enforce it? Nobody, really. Not the way a court enforces the vote-buying statute, or federal prosecutors enforce insider trading. Sit with that for a second, because it should bother you more than "not illegal" usually does. Insider trading has a name, a statute, an agency whose entire job is to catch it. Paying an individual for their vote has a name and a statute too. A president using the treasury to entrench his own hold on power doesn't have any of that. Not because someone decided the voters should handle it instead. Because nobody who built this body of law ever seriously imagined this particular move. It's not a feature anyone designed. It's a blank spot nobody filled in. No prosecutor, no court, no clause in the Constitution can do what you can do right now, just by recognizing what this actually is and declining the trade. Maybe this gets a name someday. A statute, a court case, a rule with teeth. Until it does, the only enforcement mechanism that exists is whether you take the deal.