Dell has a long-standing partnership with Microsoft and is a major buyer of Microsoft Windows PC licenses.
The company’s founder, Michael Dell, has appeared at White House events during Trump’s second term and sits on the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. Dell’s family foundation pledged more than US$6b last year to help fund “Trump accounts,” which will seed investments for 25 million American children.
Greg Williams, director of the Centre for Defence Information at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, said: “This absolutely does ring alarm bells with regard to conflicts of interest”.
The Trump Organisation said this month that the President’s investment holdings were managed exclusively by independent third-party financial institutions.
Presidents are exempt from a conflict-of-interest law that prohibits federal employees from taking action in their official roles that would benefit their personal finances. There is also no legal requirement requiring a sitting president to give up a financial benefit because of a potential conflict.
Margaret Dylus-Yukins, senior legal counsel for ethics at the Campaign Legal Centre and a former Office of Government Ethics lawyer, said that – although the ethics rules did not apply to the president or vice president – “the ethics norm has been for presidents to historically avoid even the appearance of self-enrichment”.
She added: “The fact that President Trump promoted a company owned by his friend that he also invests in does, indeed, create an appearance of a conflict of interest, though it does not constitute an actual ethics violation under the current rules.”
Williams said the Government should “revisit the arrangement whereby we rely on the President’s own sense of integrity rather than law to avoid conflicts of interest”.
Such a move would require an act of Congress.
Independent watchdog groups have long charged that Trump, in his second term, has used his office for his personal gain and that of his family.
Since his election, the Trump family has profited from Trump-themed cryptocurrency and signed overseas deals in countries that have reason to cosy up to the United States and its leader.
More recently, Trump agreed to drop a lawsuit against the IRS – which he oversees – as part of an agreement that established a nearly US$1.8b Justice Department fund to compensate those who, like him, claim they have been targets of a “weaponised” justice system under the Biden administration.
Along with the Dell stock purchases, Trump’s latest financial disclosure, released this month, revealed tens of millions of dollars in other trades. The form showed, for example, that Trump bought stock in leading companies such as Microsoft and Amazon months before the Pentagon announced deals to deploy their technology in classified computer networks.
Trump’s assets are held in a trust managed by his children. That differs from previous presidents’ blind trusts, which were not managed by family members and were designed to prevent their owners from knowing how their investments were being handled.
For his part, the President has criticised congressional Democrats for years for making stock trades that he says were based on insider information. At his State of the Union address in February, Trump called for the passage of a bipartisan bill to ban congressional stock trading, but the measure has stalled.
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