AILSA CHANG, HOST:

President Trump’s chaotic tariff policy is spooking investors again. The Dow closed down just over a thousand points one day after Trump announced a 90-day pause on many of his new tariffs. Now, a social media post that he made yesterday, hours before announcing that pause, has raised accusations of improprieties, such as market manipulation and insider trading. Some Democratic lawmakers are calling for an investigation. NPR financial correspondent Maria Aspan joins us now to explain. Hi, Maria.

MARIA ASPAN, BYLINE: Hey there.

CHANG: OK, so these are pretty serious accusations, right? Like, just catch us up on why there are calls for an investigation.

ASPAN: It’s kind of a tale of two social media posts.

CHANG: OK.

ASPAN: Yesterday morning, shortly after the U.S. stock market opened, President Trump posted on his Truth Social network in all caps, this is a great time to buy. Now, as you remember, the stock market had been tumbling for days after Trump unveiled his tariff plan on virtually every country last week. So at first, this post could have looked like a run-of-a-mill confidence booster. But then, less than four hours later, Trump said he would pause most of those tariffs.

CHANG: Right.

ASPAN: Stocks immediately shot up in relief, with the Dow closing up almost 3,000 points. So if you had, in fact, followed Trump’s advice in the morning and bought into the stock market right away, you would have made a lot of money by the end of the day.

CHANG: Right.

ASPAN: Now, the White House said in a statement that Trump was just trying to reassure the markets and Americans, but it’s the sequence of events that has led Democrats and others to call for investigations.

CHANG: And what are they alleging exactly?

ASPAN: They’re saying that Trump may have been trying to deliberately manipulate the markets or to enable others to trade on insider knowledge before it became public. Senators Adam Schiff and Ruben Gallego sent a letter to the White House and asked the Office of Government Ethics to probe who knew what in advance. Senator Elizabeth Warren also called for an investigation. She asked on the floor of Congress if this was, quote, “corruption in plain sight.”

But, Ailsa, it’s important to note this isn’t just a partisan matter. I spoke this morning to Richard Painter at the University of Minnesota. He was also the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush. And he told me that if anyone in the Bush administration had done this, that person probably would have been fired.

RICHARD PAINTER: We can’t have senior public officials, including the president, talking about stock prices and where to buy or to sell at the same time as they are making and announcing decisions that have a dramatic impact on stock prices.

CHANG: Wait, what, wait. Is that Painter’s way of saying that there was market manipulation?

ASPAN: Not quite. Painter says there’s not clear evidence of that, but he does say that Trump’s post on Truth Social raised serious questions and should be investigated. He also points out that Trump already has a track record of pushing the boundaries, at the very least.

PAINTER: Financial conflicts of interests for President Trump have been a concern since he was first elected in 2016.

ASPAN: And now he says the problems are even greater. For example, the president has embraced the crypto industry and promised much more crypto-friendly regulation at a time that he and his family have a lot of crypto business interests.

CHANG: Well, what can we expect will happen next at this point?

ASPAN: Not much. I mean, Republicans do control both the House and the Senate, and they’ve shown little interest in picking fights with Trump. And again, the White House says Trump was just trying to reassure the markets. Now, normally, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigates accusations of insider trading, but the SEC declined to comment. And Trump has issued an executive order to try to exert more control over independent federal agencies. So it seems unlikely we’ll see much happen.

CHANG: That is NPR’s Maria Aspan. Thank you, Maria.

ASPAN: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.