Starring: Congress, Clueless Crusaders, and the Distraction Industrial Complex

If you wanted to know how to pretend to fight corruption, look no further than the present moment. Bill Ackman brought insider trading back into the news by accusing Howard Lutnick of being positioned against the stock market.

Ackman surreptitiously apologized publicly on Twitter shortly afterwards. However, it was enough to trigger a lot of public outcry about corruption. Thousands of accounts are flooding social media with takes on whether Trump committed insider trading or market manipulation – blaming his posts for the market’s big upswing.

That must mean it’s time, once again, for America’s favorite political theater: pretending to fight corruption. This week’s revival features Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Eric Swalwell, and Elizabeth Warren – on stage, shouting about banning Congress from trading stocks, as if that’s the apex of financial reform.

BREAKING: It’s not.

This is a show. And worse, it’s a bad one – because the people pretending to be your champions don’t know a derivative from a dinner roll.

What Insider Trading Isn’t

Spoiler: You need a duty to breach, not just a Truth Social post.

Insider trading, at its core, is about having access to material nonpublic information and violating a fiduciary duty in order to benefit from it in such a way that does damage to the market or individuals. It doesn’t mean reading a Trump post on Truth Social and placing a bet – it means having privileged access that isn’t available to the public, and betraying trust by acting on it. The bar for proving this is incredibly high.

There’s also no consistent doctrine. In fact, America has informally accepted the precedent that “if the President does it, it’s not illegal.” This was essentially how George W. Bush’s administration handled his Middle Eastern war and Patriot Act.

Some Congressmembers may behave as if their acting on information they receive is not a breach of duty if it’s “for their constituents,” which is a slippery slope. But belief isn’t the standard – trust and damages are. If you can’t prove damages, you’re just shouting about corruption with no end in sight. That’s something AOC, Sanders, and Warren all fail to comprehend. They’d rather be performers than results producers.

Most of these people barely understand the systems they’re pretending to regulate.

Wall Street Is Where the Real Criminals Are

If Congress is a symptom, Wall Street is the disease.

Let’s say every single member of Congress was trading on non-public material information. That’s about 635 people. Their resources pale in comparison to the richest Americans or foreign nationals. Now also compare that number of 635 people, to the tens of thousands of people working at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Citadel, and the rest of them. These firms have entire departments dedicated to not getting caught. They operate in private. They front-run, ladder, spoof, and abuse order flow with a level of sophistication most lawmakers can’t even comprehend.

Meanwhile, these same members of Congress grandstanding about corruption are unwilling – or too afraid – to name the actual players. They obsess over their own chambers, while ignoring the fact that the real criminals wear tailored suits on Park Avenue and have direct access to regulators, fund managers, and lawmakers alike. If you’re worried about insider trading and you care about protecting the American people, go after Wall Street. If you shut that pipeline down, Congressional insider trading would dry up overnight because they’d have no one left to play ball with.

Holding “No Stocks” Is Not a Flex, Congressmen

Ignorance is not a demonstration of integrity.

AOC, and Swalwell, both proudly boast they don’t own any stocks – as if that puts them above reproach. But this isn’t a badge of honor. It’s a confession of their detachment. Over 50% of Americans are directly invested in the stock market, and virtually all are tied to it in some way through their jobs, pensions, or daily life. To act like they are somehow virtuous for not even so much as creating a paper account to learn how things work, is honestly pathetic. Not being invested doesn’t make them clean – it makes them unprepared to recognize the rot and how to prevent toxicity.

Trump, Tariffs, and the Shell Game

He’s not trading stocks. He’s rewriting the system.

Trump doesn’t need to insider trade in the traditional sense. He’s doing something far more dangerous: reengineering the financial machinery around himself. His recent tariff post wasn’t what moved markets – it covered up how he did that. The movement(s) from the public, markets, and Congress, are not going to catch Trump in action, because they don’t even know what they’re talking about.

Behind the scenes, Trump has assembled something much more potent.

DOGE wasn’t just a meme to him – it was a policy shield. While Elon Musk got blamed for firing people (he has no authority to) simply because of his wealth and contribution to Trump’s electoral campaign, Trump was really writing the orders. That’s how our government works. Calling Elon “President Musk” was branded as something that would bother Trump, but it does not. He can even act like it would or wouldn’t, but the point is that Elon has been there to cover for things Trump is doing that would otherwise be too plainly illegal.

Also, doing it under the title of a shitcoin like DOGEcoin means that Trump can blur the line between government financing and cryptocurrency. That is part of his bigger, broader scheme, that few talk about and even fewer can comprehend.

Trump’s cryptocurrency firm, World Liberty Financial (owned in partnership with real estate and shadow banking ally Steve Witkoff), functions as a kind of rogue state monetary node. Meanwhile, the DJT stock ticker is problematic for different reasons.

$DJT Gets Too Little Attention

It’s state media. Personally owned state media, at that. That is like something nobody’s ever seen before. Not even North Korea technically has it set up that way. KCNA is state-owned. It’s not Kim Media Agency.

DJT is barely functional as a company, having lost ~80% of its value since Trump got involved and changed the ticker, so when it jumps up 8% or so in a day, it may look to some reporters like he’s made a bunch of money. In reality, the stock itself is still failing miserably. What he plans to do with this entity may still be coming to fruition.

Anyway, he doesn’t need to break the rules anymore. He’s busy rewriting them.

Fake Reform Is Worse Than No Reform

You don’t regulate optics. You regulate systems.

This new push to “ban Congressional stock trading” is marketed as reform, but it’s cosmetic. It targets appearance rather than infrastructure. Insider trading is a real crime – but catching it means understanding the mechanics of how fraud happens. That means following the trade execution chains, flagging suspicious settlement patterns, and monitoring coordination across legal and financial intermediaries.

AOC’s media position makes her look more like an elementary social studies teacher than an actual member of Congress. Eric Swalwell is like the least popular football player on the team whose parents forced him into student government. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are like their chaperones. It’s really sad.

These lawmakers are ineffectual. These lawmakers yell into cameras while refusing to name their own party’s offenders. They obsess over the institutional pipelines enabling insider trades, the shell entities laundering capital gains, the PACs washing money through vendor payments, but have never had a policy or actual judicial success on these issues. They are inept, cowardly, or in need of education they’re too arrogant to get.

Without these people changing, “banning stock trades” will remain just a distraction.

If the people who are supposedly policing corruption don’t even know how the crime is occurring, they’re not watchdogs – they’re theater kids.

I Tried to Help. She Didn’t Listen.

I reached out to AOC’s office. Multiple times. Not as a critic. As someone with insight  offering to help them understand the systems they were criticizing. Offering to educate their staff on the layers of corruption buried in our markets that they are blind to. I’ve offered to help her become the kind of leader who could actually challenge power.

They ignored me.

That might not sound surprising, but it matters. Because these are the people claiming they want to fix things. And when someone offers to help – not with slogans, but with real strategic insight – and they ghost you? That tells you all you need to know.

Insider Trading Is Often Stopped – By Outsiders

Insider trading is a problem. But in the modern financial system, it’s hardly the biggest one. Trump has effectively seized control of America’s monetary levers. Through strategic deregulation, digital infrastructure seizure, crypto laundering, and media manipulation, he’s turned our economic infrastructure into a private ecosystem for self-dealing. And while that’s happening, the people who claim to oppose him are focused on the wrong fight – often with the wrong tools – led by the wrong people.

This has been Part 1 of How to Pretend to Fight Corruption.

There will be more. Because the show, unfortunately, isn’t over.