Trump’s Golden Goose: Trump’s AI Push, His Portfolio, and the Bill Coming Due
As seven in ten Americans revolt against the data-center buildout swallowing their electricity grids and drinking their water, the President of the United States is holding stock in the very companies profiting from it — and has now declared he will form an “AI Force” to protect them from the public.
On the morning of Saturday, September 19, 2026, the President of the United States posted on his private social-media platform that he would form an “AI Force” modeled on Space Force, appoint an “AI Czar” chosen for “High I.Q.” and use “our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System” to look for what he described only as “BAD.” He offered no budget, no legislative pathway, no nominee, and no scope of authority. What he offered instead was a promise: that his administration would “not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry” — an industry that, according to his own 927-page financial disclosure, he happens to own a great deal of.
The announcement, first reported by Axios and confirmed by CNN, CBS News, and ABC News, landed at a peculiar political moment. A March 2026 Gallup survey found that 71 percent of Americans oppose the construction of an AI data center in their local area — 48 percent of them “strongly opposed.” Opposition to data centers now runs higher than opposition to nuclear power plants. On July 18, according to a compilation by the Wikipedia project cataloguing the movement, 142 protests took place across 42 states. And yet on Monday, September 1, the President told those Americans on Truth Social that “the only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor.” He called AI the “Golden Goose.” He warned that “China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement.”
The question a serious observer must ask is not whether the President genuinely believes any of this. The question is why he is willing to burn political capital, alienate his own voters (60 percent of Republicans told Fox News they oppose local data centers), and pick fights with Republican governors — Texas’s Greg Abbott among them — over an issue that is polling catastrophically for his party heading into the midterms. The answer, laid out plainly in the public record, is that the President has a direct, disclosed, and substantial personal financial stake in the outcome.
I. The Portfolio
The 2025 financial disclosure certified by the Office of Government Ethics runs 927 pages. By comparison, Vice President JD Vance’s disclosure runs 17. Joe Biden’s final disclosure ran 11. Barack Obama’s ran eight. As U.S. News & World Report observed, the sheer scale of the document is a fact in itself: no modern president has entered office with a comparable web of individual holdings in publicly traded companies that his own administration is regulating, contracting with, or actively promoting.
Within that web, the President’s five largest individual stock holdings — Apple, Nvidia, Broadcom, Microsoft, and Tesla — are all among the largest beneficiaries of the AI infrastructure buildout his executive orders are accelerating. On July 23, 2025, ABC News reports, the same day the White House unveiled its “AI Action Plan,” Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million each in Amazon, Apple, Broadcom, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia — the six hyperscalers and semiconductor firms whose fortunes were most directly affected by the plan being signed on that same day.
The pattern extends well below the household names. According to Data Center Dynamics, which reviewed the 113-page 2026 periodic transaction report, the President on February 10 bought between $500,000 and $1 million of shares in Equinix, the country’s dominant data-center real-estate operator. On March 17 he purchased between $1 million and $5 million each in Trane Technologies (data-center cooling systems) and Eaton Corporation (data-center power infrastructure). Those were among his largest single-day purchases of the year.
These are only the reportable transactions above the $1,000 threshold; trades below that level do not have to be disclosed at all. In the first three months of 2026 alone, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Robert Garcia found, the President’s accounts executed 3,555 individual stock trades worth up to half a billion dollars. His first year in office produced more than 14,000 trades worth up to $1.06 billion. For comparison, his 2017 disclosure — the first year of his first term — reported 86 stock transactions.
An investigation by the progressive nonprofit More Perfect Union, later reviewed and refined by the outlet American Investigator, identified as many as $25 million in reported transactions across at least 25 companies tied to data-center construction, real-estate operations, or the supply chain that feeds them — companies including Amphenol, Arista Networks, Trane, and AECOM. American Investigator was careful to note that this figure represents transaction ranges, not a certified current-holdings total; disclosure filings are, by design, imprecise. But that imprecision cuts against the President, not for him. The public does not know whether he has profited from these positions. The public also does not know that he has not. That is precisely what a real blind trust is meant to prevent — and what Trump’s revocable trust, with his son Donald Trump Jr. as its sole trustee, was designed to circumvent.
“The appearance of numerous conflicts of interest from a President trading in individual stocks — including the potential for insider trading, market manipulation, and policy decisions that benefit the President’s stock portfolio rather than the public interest — undermines public trust in government.”
— Sen. Elizabeth Warren & Rep. Robert Garcia, letter to President Trump, August 13, 2026
II. The Policy That Makes the Portfolio Pay
On July 23, 2025, the President signed Executive Order 14318, titled “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure.” The order declares it “a priority of my Administration to facilitate the rapid and efficient buildout” of AI data centers and their supporting energy infrastructure. It fast-tracks environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act. It directs the Department of Commerce to make federal funding available to qualifying projects. And it specifies, in plain terms, that the components the order is designed to accelerate include “energy infrastructure, semiconductors, networking equipment and data storage” — a list that reads like a bill of materials for the President’s own portfolio.
The order is one of three AI executive orders the President signed that day. As the law firm Paul Hastings summarized, the package is a coordinated federal push to remove regulatory friction from every step of the AI buildout — from the data centers themselves to the transmission lines that power them to the semiconductors that fill them. And on that same day, according to ABC News, the President’s investment accounts bought between $1 million and $5 million each in six of the largest publicly traded beneficiaries of the policy he had just signed.
This is the mechanism. This is how a President with a disclosed portfolio in the AI infrastructure sector uses the powers of his office to increase the value of the assets in his own accounts. It does not require a smoking-gun email. It does not require testimony from a broker. It requires only the public documents his administration has itself produced, read side by side.
III. The “AI Force”
This is the context in which the President’s Saturday announcement must be read. He is not proposing a new agency to protect the American public from a rapidly emerging and imperfectly understood technology. He is proposing an agency to protect the industry from the American public.
The Truth Social post is explicit on the point. The government, the President wrote, will “cherish” the AI industry, “help it, and watch over it, as it grows.” He dismissed concerns about existential AI risk — concerns being raised by the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind — as a “hoax.” He rejected the calls for regulation those same CEOs have made. He announced that the “AI Czar” position, vacated in March by tech investor David Sacks (who kept large personal holdings in AI and crypto assets during his tenure, prompting an ongoing Senate ethics investigation), would be filled by someone selected on the basis of “High I.Q.”
The proposed “AI Force,” modeled on the Space Force created in the President’s first term, would — if actually stood up as a military branch — require an act of Congress. As ABC News noted, no such legislation has been drafted, no budget has been proposed, no mission has been defined. The announcement was made not through a formal policy process but through a social-media post on a weekend, alongside a separate post floating alternative names for artificial intelligence itself (the President suggested “Superior Intelligence,” “Extreme Intelligence,” or “Supreme Intelligence”). What was announced, in substance, was a posture: the federal government would side with the industry, not with the communities.
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IV. The Bill Coming Due
Someone is paying for the buildout the President is racing to accelerate, and that someone is not the President’s donors in Silicon Valley. It is the American ratepayer. According to a Consumer Reports investigation published in July 2026, residential electricity prices rose 7.3 percent between April 2025 and April 2026 alone. Roughly one in six U.S. households were behind on their utility bills entering 2026, and Americans could collectively owe $25 billion in utility debt by year’s end.
The connection to data centers is not speculative. A PolitiFact analysis of Energy Information Administration data found that between March 2021 and March 2026, average residential retail electricity prices rose 94 percent in Washington, D.C., 74 percent in Maryland, 73 percent in Maine, and 58 percent in New York — the corridors where the data-center buildout has concentrated most aggressively. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute reports that utilities in 2025 received requests for at least 700 gigawatts of new power connections tied to data-center development — more electricity than the entire United States consumed in all of 2023.
In the first half of 2026, utility companies requested $18.6 billion in rate increases. The Department of Energy estimates data centers could account for up to 15.3 percent of the country’s total electricity use by 2030. And Virginia, Georgia, and Maryland have collectively already forfeited more than $4 billion in state tax revenue through sales and property tax exemptions granted to the same data-center operators the President is now personally invested in.
The states are not acting on ideology. They are acting on math. The bipartisan consensus is remarkable in an era of near-total polarization: Gallup found that 75 percent of Democrats, 74 percent of independents, and 63 percent of Republicans oppose local data-center construction. The President is not merely on the wrong side of public opinion. He is on the wrong side of a coalition that includes the majority of his own party.
V. The Democratic Response
On June 18, 2026, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, legislation that would give the American public a 50 percent ownership stake in the largest AI companies through a one-time 50 percent tax on their stock. At current valuations, Sanders estimated, the resulting fund would be worth roughly $7 trillion. A 5 percent annual dividend would deliver more than $1,000 per year to every American.
The philosophical argument, as Sanders told the Washington Post, is one about who built the resource in question: “AI was not created out of thin air. It was not a brilliant idea that just popped into Mark Zuckerberg’s head or Elon Musk’s imagination. The foundation of AI is based on the collective knowledge of humanity and the creative work of tens of millions of people.” The technology was trained on the public’s work, developed with the assistance of publicly funded research, and — as the rate-hike data makes clear — is now being subsidized by the same public through its electricity bills. Sanders proposes, simply, that the public share in what the public has already paid for.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Representative Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) have taken a complementary approach, focused not on the industry but on the President himself. In an August 13 letter to Trump, they demanded he name the “third-party institutions and managers” he claims direct his trades, and pressed him on 30 specific instances in which trades coincided suspiciously with policy announcements. They are preparing legislation, they wrote, to ban presidents from owning individual stocks. Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has been convening roundtables with families living next to data centers and calling for federal ratepayer protections.
“The American people deserve to know that the President is not using his office to increase the value of his stock portfolios, rather than working to bring down the cost of groceries.”
— Sen. Warren and Rep. Garcia, joint letter to President Trump
None of these bills will pass a Republican Congress. All of them will help define the terrain on which the 2026 midterms are fought. And all of them share a common analytical premise: that the President is not a neutral steward of AI policy. He is a market participant using the powers of his office to move the market in favor of his own holdings.
A Presidency Unable to Discharge Its Duties
Ratified in 1967 in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution establishes the mechanism by which executive power is transferred when a president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Section 4 — the provision most directly relevant to the current crisis — authorizes the Vice President, together with a majority of the Cabinet, to declare the President incapacitated, at which point the Vice President assumes the powers of the office as Acting President.
The framers of the amendment envisioned it as a response to physical or medical incapacity. But the constitutional text says only that the President must be “unable to discharge” his duties. Legal scholars have argued for decades — and continue to argue — that the constitutional standard is not limited to strokes or comas. It reaches any condition, of any origin, that renders a president incapable of putting the interests of the country ahead of interests of his own.
Who has called for invocation
Since January 2026, more than 85 members of the House and Senate have publicly called for Section 4 to be invoked against President Trump. In April, House Judiciary ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) introduced legislation to create a 17-member commission under Section 4 to formally assess the President’s fitness — a bill with dozens of Democratic co-sponsors. Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.), Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), and Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) have each called for invocation. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has done the same.
The constitutional argument
The case being made now, in the specific context of the AI buildout, is this. A president who owns individual stock in the companies his executive orders regulate is not merely presenting a political problem — he is presenting a constitutional one. Article II vests the executive power in a President who is required by oath to “faithfully execute” the laws. A president who uses the powers of that office to enrich himself is not faithfully executing the laws; he is subordinating them. When the same president then publicly attacks his own voters as “backwards and poor” for opposing the industry he is invested in, and announces via social media the creation of a paramilitary “Force” to “protect” that industry, the question of whether he is capable of discharging the duties of the office in the interest of the American people is no longer theoretical.
The practical barriers
An honest assessment: Section 4 requires Vice President JD Vance and a majority of the Cabinet. Neither will act. Republicans control Congress and would not sustain the invocation even if it happened. As PBS News observed, the President “has the support of Vice President JD Vance, his Cabinet and the majority of Republicans in Congress.” The invocation is, in the short term, politically impossible.
Why the barriers do not negate the case
That impossibility is not an argument against invocation. It is an argument against the current composition of the Vice Presidency, the Cabinet, and Congress. The constitutional standard for Section 4 is not “will the standard be met by officials who will act on it.” The standard is whether the underlying condition exists — whether the President is, in constitutional fact, unable to discharge his duties in the interest of the American people. The bipartisan supermajority of Americans who oppose the President’s signature industrial policy, the disclosed personal financial stake he holds in that policy’s success, and the increasingly erratic manner in which the policy is being announced and defended all form a record. That record does not disappear because the officials empowered to act on it decline to do so. It waits.
VI. The Question of Leadership
Set aside, for the moment, the constitutional argument. Set aside the ethics investigations, the pending legislation, the letters from ranking members. Consider the simpler question: what does a leader do when 71 percent of the country he leads is telling him he is wrong?
A leader listens. A leader adjusts. A leader takes the concerns of the governed as data, not as sabotage. This President has done the opposite. He has mocked the concerned as “backwards and poor.” He has told them that objecting to a $500 million data center in their county means they want to be “unsuccessful.” He has floated a militarized federal apparatus to protect an industry against the will of its own customers. And he has done all of this while holding, on a disclosed basis, seven-figure positions in the companies whose fortunes his rhetoric and his executive orders are engineered to lift.
This is not leadership. It is a market position dressed up as a policy agenda. And it is being funded, in the most literal possible sense, by the electricity bills of the very Americans the President is calling backwards.
Editorial Conclusion
A President who owns the stock cannot be trusted to write the rules. A President who calls his own voters “backwards and poor” for objecting to the industry he is personally invested in has ceased to represent them. And a President who responds to a bipartisan supermajority of American opposition by proposing a paramilitary “Force” to protect the industry from the public is not defending the country. He is defending his portfolio.
The remedy is not partisan. It is constitutional. Presidents must divest. Congress must legislate. States must continue their moratoriums. And the American people must recognize what the disclosure documents already prove: the Golden Goose the President keeps invoking is not the country’s. It is his.
Sources & References
- White House — Executive Order 14318: Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure (July 23, 2025)
- Data Center Dynamics — US President Donald Trump personally invests millions in data center industry firms
- American Investigator — Trump’s Data Center Push Overlaps With His Disclosed Portfolio
- ABC News — Trump discloses 21,000 securities trades during first year in office
- U.S. News — 5 Insights From Trump’s 2025 Financial Disclosure
- Axios — Trump wants a new AI czar and an “AI Force” modeled on Space Force
- CNN — Trump vows to create ‘AI Force’ and appoint AI czar
- CBS News — Trump vows to form “AI Force,” says he won’t allow slowdown of AI development
- Sen. Bernie Sanders — Sanders Introduces Legislation to Create $7 Trillion AI Sovereign Wealth Fund
- Washington Post — Bernie Sanders proposes wealth fund to give Americans a stake in AI
- Sen. Elizabeth Warren — Warren, Garcia Press Trump on Thousands of Stock Trades
- CNBC — Democrats demand Trump reveal stock managers, explain suspicious trades
- Gallup — Americans Oppose AI Data Centers in Their Area (71% opposition)
- Consumer Reports — Inside the Energy Affordability Crisis
- PolitiFact — How much have data centers increased electricity prices?
- The Hill — Trump says communities opposed to AI data centers want to be ‘backwards and poor’
- Built In — States Push Data Center Moratoriums as AI Growth Surges
- Axios — House Democrats file long-shot 25th Amendment bill targeting Trump
- PBS News — Could the 25th Amendment be invoked against Trump? Here’s how it works
- Sen. Warren — Warren, Stansbury Launch Investigation into Trump Crypto & AI Czar’s Ethics Conflicts
- EESI — Data Center Power Demands Are Contributing to Higher Energy Bills
- Good Authority — Opposing AI data centers is one thing Americans agree on
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