May 29, 2026
President Donald Trump’s first-quarter financial disclosures made headlines for the sheer volume of trades made. Then came the sushi talk.
Trump made around 3,700 individual stock transactions between January and March 2026, according to the OGE filing Trump signed, averaging more than 40 per trading day, covering Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Oracle and dozens of other companies.
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The filings also showed that he made a February 2 purchase between $1 million and $5 million in Kura Sushi USA (NASDAQ:KRUS), a conveyor belt sushi chain with 88 locations across 22 states and Washington, D.C. The transaction was listed as “solicited,” meaning a broker or investment advisor recommended the trade, and Trump didn’t.
Conflicting stories
The Trump Organization says Trump plays no role in individual investment decisions. Kimberly Benza, a Trump Organization spokesperson, told NOTUS that Trump’s investments are “maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions.”
But NOTUS says the White House gave a different account the following day — Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, told them: “President Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children.” The White House added that there were no conflicts of interest there.
In an X post replying to criticism of Trump’s stock trades by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Eric Trump wrote that assets are “invested in a blind trust by the largest financial institutions. To suggest that individual stocks are being bought or sold, at the discretion of any member of the Trump family, would be a lie and blatantly false.” (Benza made the same statement in response to NOTUS’ follow-up from her original statement to them.)
NOTUS pointed out it can’t really be called a blind trust — Trump personally signed the OGE disclosure, so he knows which individual stocks he owns. The Trump Organization hasn’t said whether the Kura Sushi buy was deliberate.
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The Kura-Fujikura theory
The investment quickly lit up Japanese finance message boards, with some users wondering if someone mixed up the name and bought the wrong stock.
Futurism picked up the theory from Japanese Yahoo Finance message boards: “Kura” in Kura Sushi looks a lot like “Fujikura,” a Tokyo-listed fiber-optics and computer hardware company that’s exploded in value thanks to the AI boom. Since Trump’s biggest Q1 trades were in tech and AI supply chain stocks like Nvidia, Dell, and Oracle, the idea is that whoever placed the order was looking for Fujikura and accidentally clicked Kura Sushi instead.
It’s just a theory, not a confirmed fact, but there is this: Trump has reportedly hated raw fish for decades. Fox Business cited the 1993 book “Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump,” by Harry Hurt III, where Trump said, during a 1990 Japan visit, that “I’m not going to eat any f***ing raw fish.”
“Does Trump have any interest in sushi? I always picture him eating steak and hamburgers every day,” one user wrote in Japanese on the Yahoo Finance board.
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Whatever the reason for the purchase, the market responded immediately. Kura Sushi USA shares rose more than 6% on May 18 after the news of Trump’s purchase went public.
Tsutomu Yamada, a market analyst at Mitsubishi UFJ eSmart Securities, said the U.S. business has been crushing it (same-store sales jumped 8.6% in the quarter through February 28, driven by 4.3% higher foot traffic in Q2, 2026). He said Trump’s ownership stake may be pushing retail investors in Tokyo to jump in, noted Bloomberg.
The bigger picture
The sushi trade may be unusual, and the broader context raises more serious questions.
Trump is the first sitting U.S. president to actively trade this amount of stocks while in office at this scale. Most modern presidents have abstained entirely — Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm in a blind trust, Ronald Reagan divested from individual stocks and Joe Biden held none.
As U.S. Representative Mike Levin (D-CA) wrote on X, “Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush kept assets in a trust. Obama and Biden didn’t trade stocks or bonds at all while in office. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is trading up to 600 stocks a week while running the country. I don’t know about you, but that looks like insider trading to me.”
And Trump has directly promoted companies he is invested in: For example, after purchasing Palantir stock, he praised the company publicly on social media; after buying Dell stock, he urged an audience at a Georgia event to “go out and buy a Dell computer.”
Morris Pearl, a former managing director at BlackRock who now chairs the Patriotic Millionaires advocacy group, told NOTUS: “The reason we have such a successful financial industry here in the U.S. is that people from all over the world feel confident that if they send their money to U.S. stockbrokers, people aren’t going to take advantage of them unfairly. Trump is destroying that, and I think that’s going to be very damaging to the U.S. financial industry in the long run.”
It remains to be seen whether we will now see Trump enjoying sushi in public. That said, Kura Sushi isn’t the only food stock in the filing. The Q1 disclosures also show Trump picked up Chipotle, Domino’s and Starbucks.
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Godwin Oluponmile is a content specialist, SEO strategist and copywriter with seven years of expertise in finance, Web 3.0, B2B SaaS and technology. His work has been featured in publications such as Entrepreneur, HackerNoon, Blocktelegraph and Benzinga.
