When the hand that signs the contract also holds the stock

Let me be direct. CNBC reports that the President of the United States purchased as much as $5 million in Axon Enterprise stock — a company that makes Tasers and law-enforcement technology — shortly before the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency began pursuing a potential $220 million contract with that same company. Axon, for its part, ramped up its lobbying in Congress during this same period. These are the reported facts. What follows is my judgment upon them.

I built the architecture of American public finance on a single premise: that the government's credit, and the government's power, must be trusted. That trust is not sentiment — it is the foundation on which every bond, every contract, every act of commerce ultimately rests. The moment a creditor, a contractor, or a citizen suspects that decisions of state are being bent toward private enrichment, that trust begins to erode. It erodes slowly at first, then all at once. I saw this in the wreckage of the Continental finances, and I have no reason to believe human nature has improved.

The corruption I warned against was never only the gross and obvious kind — the bribe, the payoff in a back room. It was also the structural kind: the arrangement in which the officer who directs public spending stands to gain personally from the direction he chooses. The law has long recognized this. Federal ethics statutes and conflict-of-interest rules exist for precisely this reason. Whether the reported trades violate those statutes is a question for the courts and the Congress; I will not pretend to know the precise legal mechanics of 2026. But the principle is not ambiguous, and it has not changed since I first argued that public officers must be answerable to the public interest alone.

I am also struck by the role of lobbying here. CNBC notes that Axon increased its lobbying pressure on Congress as this contract took shape. I do not object to private companies petitioning their government — that is commerce, and commerce is vigorous by nature. What I object to is the fusion of that lobbying with a president who holds a material financial stake in the outcome. At that point, the commerce power of the federal government — which I always argued should be broad and energetic — becomes an instrument not of national vigor but of personal accumulation. That is a perversion of everything the power was constructed to achieve.

An energetic executive, I always insisted, must also be a bounded one. Vigor without accountability is not republican government; it is something older and worse. The check on executive self-dealing is not weakness — it is the condition under which executive strength remains legitimate. Congress should investigate these reported trades with full seriousness, the Inspector General of the relevant agencies should examine the contract process, and the public should demand a clear account. The alternative — a government in which those who direct public contracts may also profit from them — is not a government I would recognize as sound, or as free.