Many don't understand the importance of President Trump lying about contacts with China in order to pump up the stock market. Isn't it his job to bolster market prices, some ask. The answer is a most emphatic no - the job of the President is to ensure that equities markets are respected for their honesty, probity, fairness and transparency. By spreading false information, Trump was actually undermining these values.
What Trump was engaging in was nothing less than a “pump and dump scheme” - an activity that is wrong, illegal and could and should land you in jail, as it did many Enron executives and the “Wolf of Wall Street.” It is also a practice Trump engaged in during his years in the private sector, when he would buy a company's stock, pump up its value by feeding rumours that he was going to launch a takeover, and then dump the shares at an inflated price. It worked - until the market cottoned on to what he was doing and left him holding the bag.
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