Thursday 16 April 2026

Is President Donald Trump manipulating the oil prices?

In early April 2026, social media users claimed an anonymous investor with connections to U.S. President Donald Trump's administration staked $51 million on the prediction that the price of oil would drop hours before the United States announced a ceasefire with Iran.

According to posts circulating on X, Instagram and Facebook, the alleged "oil short" resulted in $170 million in profit for the anonymous Trump ally. "Shorting" is a common trading practice that means betting that an asset's price will drop.

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom's office also shared the claim in an April 8 X post, alongside the caption, "While you're paying billions more at the gas pump, Trump's allies are cashing in."

The claim originated from an April 8 Facebook post (archived) from Really American, a left-leaning, anti-Trump media outlet. The post claimed to show one account's trades in Brent crude oil by a user of Hyperdash.com — a trading terminal, or an interface that investors use to make transactions and track the market. Really American alleged that the timing of the shorts indicated a Trump ally was insider trading, an illegal practice in which someone trades assets on privileged information.

(Brent crude oil, sometimes referred to as "Brent crude" or "Brent oil," is a designation for certain kinds of crude oil. The term also refers to a futures contract — agreements to buy or sell oil at a set price at a predetermined future date — for this type of oil, which serves as one of the benchmarks for oil pricing worldwide. The other is the West Texas Intermediate.)




The screenshot in Really American's post did not include the username of the account that made the trades, making it impossible for Snopes to verify the screenshot was unaltered or to assess whether the user had any connection to Trump. (Traders' portfolios change often, meaning that by the time we sought to verify the information, we could not identify a specific Hyperdash user who may have run this trade.) It was unclear whether learning the username of the trader would make it possible to tie this person to the Trump administration, as Hyperdash users often trade anonymously.

As such, we have left the claim unrated.

We reached out to Really American's founder, Justin Horwitz, to ask who the user is so we can attempt to verify the details in the screenshot directly on Hyperdash, and we will update this report should he respond.

Despite the fact that Snopes could not verify the details of Really American's post, it's true that thousands of shorts on oil prices took place on April 7, 2026, minutes before Trump announced a ceasefire with Iran on his social network, Truth Social. The evidence aligns with a reported pattern of well-timed bets set to benefit from major decisions of his administration that, according to experts the BBC consulted for a March 2026 article, may suggest insider trading. It was not clear from the available data how many different traders were behind those shorts or who those traders were.

In an email, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said any implication that Trump administration officials use nonpublic information for financial benefit "without evidence is baseless and irresponsible reporting."

"The only special interest that will ever guide President Trump is the best interest of the American people," Ingle said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a follow-up inquiry asking about potential insider trading by private individuals with connections to Trump.

We also asked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the government's commodity market watchdog — if this is a pattern it has noticed. We await a response.

Really American post doesn't name trader
Really American's post claimed the screenshot proved that insider trading was happening either inside or in connection with the White House:

While the post included an image of two of Trump's sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, the text of the post did not speculate on whom the anonymous trader was. Further, it was unclear whether the username would be enough evidence to identify the user as a Trump ally.
By Anna Rascouët-Paz snopes.com

#mindsetiseverything #bjj #learntotrade #EducationMatters #traderlife

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Image courtesy of Image courtesy of Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto, accessed via Getty Images

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