When President Trump paused a punishing round of global tariffs last week, he attributed his change of heart to one main thing.
“I was watching the bond market,” he said. “The bond market is very tricky.”
Mr. Trump should know — he had a big personal stake in it.
A New York Times analysis of Mr. Trump’s financial holdings shows that he had roughly $125 million to about $443 million invested in bonds as of last year, a range that far eclipsed his investment portfolio’s exposure to the stock market.
Mr. Trump does own a huge stake in his publicly traded social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, but he has said he has no plans to sell those shares, currently worth roughly $2 billion. The company’s stock, which he listed separately from his liquid stock and bond holdings on his latest financial disclosure, had already plunged about 40 percent this year before the new round of tariffs.
Mr. Trump appeared unfazed when the tariffs sent the stock market into a tailspin, wiping out trillions of dollars in value in a matter of days.
His nonchalance faded on April 9 after fears over the impact of Mr. Trump’s tariffs had spread to the government bond market, posing a potential existential threat to the global economy and signaling a weakening faith in U.S.-backed assets as a safe haven. Mr. Trump, whose own bond investments were also at risk, paused the most punitive of the import taxes for 90 days for all countries except China.
It is possible Mr. Trump’s portfolio has changed somewhat since he submitted his latest disclosure in August. There is also no indication that the president’s finances motivated his decision to pause the tariffs, and any benefit to Mr. Trump’s own investment portfolio may well have been coincidental. Some of his top supporters and economic advisers were urging Mr. Trump to change course, and he was reportedly reluctant to do so, even on the morning of the decision.
Still, the series of events underscored a broader entanglement of the president’s personal and political interests, an ethical conflict stemming from his decision to forgo putting his assets into a blind trust, where he would not be able to control them.
His administration’s deregulatory agenda has already benefited some of his businesses — including a lucrative cryptocurrency venture — and one of his core campaign promises of lowering interest rates would most likely enrich his investment portfolio.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump assailed Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, for having kept interest rates elevated. Mr. Trump has repeatedly called on the Fed to cut rates, even though Mr. Powell has expressed concern that such a move could fuel inflation.
Privately, Mr. Trump is thought to have been convinced by his advisers that ousting the Fed chair would cause more volatility in financial markets.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that Mr. Trump was not acting for his own benefit.
“President Trump stepped away from a multibillion-dollar business empire to run for president, and he has sacrificed greatly ever since,” she said. “The American people trust President Trump because they know he only acts in the best interest of our country, period.”
The tariffs had been in effect for only a few hours when Mr. Trump paused them, but his announcement of them a week earlier, on April 2, had already wrought havoc in financial markets.
Stocks fell by magnitudes last seen during the coronavirus pandemic. Volatility erupted. Analysts, economists and investors grappled with the upending of the global economic order.
The day before he finally backed down, Mr. Trump publicly showed no sign of blinking, even as the S&P 500 erased all its gains for the past 12 months.
“I know what the hell I’m doing,” he told Republicans that day.
The next day, April 9, he urged investors to be patient.
“BE COOL!” he wrote on his social media platform that morning, claiming that “everything is going to work out well.”
Mr. Trump even urged investors to return to the market. “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT,” he wrote, using his initials, which also happen to be the stock ticker for Trump Media.
That week, the government bond market had also started to collapse, sending the value of government debt sharply lower. Treasuries are normally considered a refuge for investors during market turmoil, which made the sell-off particularly worrying.
Mr. Trump announced his partial tariff delay hours after his assurances.
The move prompted the biggest one-day gain in the stock market since 2008, raising questions about whether lawmakers or members of the administration may have personally benefited from the abrupt, tariff-driven market moves. The New York attorney general’s office is in the preliminary stages of assessing whether anyone in Mr. Trump’s orbit may have committed insider trading before his announcement.
While there is no indication that Mr. Trump did anything improper, he most likely had a financial incentive to change course.
Although much of the president’s net worth, which he estimates in the billions, is tied up in the value of Trump Media, his hotels, office buildings and other properties, he has a significant sum of money invested in financial markets.
Two years ago, Mr. Trump said he had more than $400 million in cash and other liquid investments.
According to The Times’s analysis of his 2024 disclosure, which reflects the value of his assets in ranges, Mr. Trump had financial investments anywhere from $206 million to more than $620 million. (One entry in the disclosure indicated that Mr. Trump held more than $50 million in a money-market fund with no top value, making it impossible to determine the true maximum total of his holdings.)
At the low end of the disclosure’s ranges, bonds would account for about 60 percent of Mr. Trump’s portfolio; cash and similar investments for roughly 30 percent; and stocks for less than 10 percent.
Even by the most conservative estimate — comparing the minimum value of bonds with the maximum of stocks — he would still hold about twice as much in bonds as in stocks, not including Trump Media.
He also reported having gold bars valued between $100,000 and $250,000.
Mr. Trump’s investment in the bond market mirrors those of many people at or close to his age looking for a safer, more stable stream of income ahead of retirement.
Last year, Mr. Trump held about $18 million to $75 million in corporate bonds, including the debt of giants like Microsoft and Apple. He also owned roughly $9 million to $42 million in U.S. Treasury bonds, the center of the recent strain in the bond market.
Municipal bonds represented nearly 80 percent of Mr. Trump’s bond holdings, according to the minimum values reported. Those included debt from some states and cities that he has clashed with, like Chicago and New York.
The returns on municipal bonds are tax-exempt, to encourage investors to finance local government debt around the country.
Broadly, the municipal bond market came under sustained pressure in the days leading up to Mr. Trump’s announcement of a tariff pause.
At one point, an exchange-traded fund of municipal bonds run by BlackRock’s iShares suffered its worst one-day decline since the pandemic-induced sell-off in 2020. The average yield, which moves inversely to its price, on another municipal bond index run by Bloomberg rose almost one percentage point in just a few days — a huge move in that market.
The government bond market stabilized soon after Mr. Trump’s decision to pause some of the tariffs. And although the sell-off briefly resumed, bonds have since recovered somewhat.
The day of his announcement, Mr. Trump celebrated the positive market reaction.
“The bond market right now is beautiful,” he said.
Peter Eavis, Matthew Goldstein and Russ Buettner contributed reporting.