Donald Trump isn’t a smart man, but he knows how to manipulate the stock market. Not only is he allegedly engaging in market manipulation while president, but it’s a Trump con that goes back decades.
Back in October 2018, the New York Times published a Pulitzer Prize-winning profile of Trump’s extensive tax fraud schemes, and in the process of that reporting uncovered one of the ways Trump screwed with the financial markets. Journalists David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner reported that Trump would routinely engage in a scam known colloquially as “greenmailing.” It involved Trump, along with his father, Fred, as his “wing man,” exploiting the news media to pump up the price of a stock by planting rumors, devised by Trump himself, about a takeover. This would drive up the price of the stock, only for Trump to either sell or to demand “lucrative concessions from the target company to make him go away.”
