Presidents aren’t supposed to pick winners, per White House ethics lawyer. Trump keeps choosing Dell

“They are truly incredible people, go out and buy a Dell computer,” Trump said. “We’re going to get him that money back one way or the other.”

Afterward, Dell shares rose as much as nearly 9% before closing up 4.4%, the third trading day since February when Trump’s public praise of Dell coincided with a same-day stock gain, raising a political and financial question: How much of Dell’s extraordinary run is Trump, and how much is just Dell being good at selling servers to companies building AI data centers?

One of the most closely followed voices in enterprise hardware thinks the answer is the hyperscalers were always going to write Dell checks for its AI servers, and a former White House ethics lawyer thinks the question is a distraction from a simpler one: Presidents aren’t supposed to pick winners to begin with. 

The pattern in question

Nine days before Trump first told the crowd to buy Dell in February, an account bearing his name bought Dell stock—between $1 million and $5 million of it disclosed in the annual financial filing Fortune previously reported. Then came the endorsement wave: In Rome, Ga., on Feb. 19; a White House Mother’s Day luncheon on May 8 (where Trump named Michael and Susan Dell directly and credited their pledge to Trump Accounts in the same breath); and the July 6 opening bell. 

On three trading days—Feb. 19, May 8, and July 6—Michael Dell’s paper wealth rose by an estimated $606 million, $8.0 billion and $4.6 billion, respectively. Those same-day, gross figures are based on Dell’s closing stock moves that don’t isolate the effect of Trump’s comments from other market forces. Dell’s current net worth is $217 billion, making him the world’s fifth-richest man.

In between those endorsements, on May 27, the Department of Defense awarded Dell a five-year contract worth up to $9.7 billion to consolidate Microsoft software licensing. The value is a ceiling, not necessarily immediate revenue to Dell.

One side: Dell is doing well without Trump’s aid

Patrick Moorhead, chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, pushed back on any narrative that centers the government in Dell’s success, telling Fortune Dell’s stock is surging because of business from hyperscalers, and not Trump’s praise. 

“Once they got attached to the AI trade, and they started selling a ton to the big neoclouds, that’s how this whole thing started,” Moorhead said, describing a “two-horse race” between Dell and Supermicro for the largest AI server accounts.

Dell’s biggest recent stock move came after earnings: Shares jumped 32.8% on May 29, the day after Dell reported record quarterly revenue, $24.4 billion in AI orders, $16.1 billion in AI server revenue, and raised its full-year AI server revenue expectations to roughly $60 billion.

Moorhead said Trump’s endorsements of Dell might have only moved retail investors, not institutional ones that already invest in Dell because of its fundamentals.

“There’s no institutional investors that have ever said: ‘Oh, Trump said this, increase the valuation by this’—it’s all retail,” Moorhead told Fortune, noting that paying attention to Trump’s public comments about a company is closer to an Internet joke than an actual investment approach.

“There is a meme that says: ‘I just should have listened to Trump’”. 

The other side: Sitting presidents shouldn’t be praising companies to begin with

Richard Painter, who served as the chief White House ethics lawyer under former President George W. Bush’s administration, told Fortune Trump trading Dell stock was “egregious,” but even if he hadn’t done that, the president praising Dell at all flies against federal standards of conduct for executive branch employees.

“The baseline rule is, even if the president is not trading, there should never be an endorsement of a particular company,” Painter said. “I would have been absolutely furious if someone had suggested that President Bush should do that.”

Painter pointed out the same regulation has barred officials from endorsing private companies “for decades” in both Republican and Democratic administrations. Asked directly whether “go out and buy a Dell computer” counts as the kind of endorsement the rule prohibits, Painter didn’t equivocate.

“That’s an endorsement,” he said. “It’s clearly a statement that this is a company that has a good business plan…you don’t say: ‘Go buy this company’s stock, even though the company is no better than the others.”

He explained Trump’s endorsement of Dell could move the market because investors assume Trump knows when Dell is about to land a federal contract that would make the company more valuable, and will trade on that assumption after Trump’s praise. 

“Maybe Donald Trump’s about to give them a big government contract or he knows that someone’s going to give them a big DoD contract, and there must be something going on that I don’t know that he does know about this company and its relationship with the federal government, and lo and behold, Dell does have federal contracts,” Painter said about investors’ reasoning. 

The White House told Fortune Trump “was rightfully praising the Dells among many other wealthy individuals and corporations” for donating to the Trump accounts and described the Dells as “patriots who are generously contributing billions of dollars of their fortune to the Trump Accounts of millions of kids from working-class families.”

Dell did not respond to Fortune‘s request for comment.

Michael Dell’s relationship with Trump

Long before Trump began praising Dell from the White House, Michael Dell had learned the value of being in the room with presidents. 

Under George W. Bush, he served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a private sector brain trust advising the White House on innovation and technology policy. Under former President Barack Obama, he joined a small group of tech CEOs at the White House to discuss trade, cybersecurity, immigration, tax reform, exports, and competitiveness. 

While Trump’s public boosterism is more explicit—and potentially more market-moving—Dell’s cultivation of presidential access is not new. 

“Michael has had relationships with every single president that has shown up,” Moorhead, who has been tracking Dell for years, noted. 

Painter described how often CEOs sought political access during the Bush years and how deliberately his office tried to block it. But Dell has cast the $6.25 billion gift as a philanthropic rather than political investment. He described the Invest America initiative—the formal name of Trump Accounts—as a bipartisan platform, and argued even a small early savings stake can expand a child’s sense of possibility.

But Dell’s proximity to Trump did not begin with Trump Accounts. 

In January 2017, days into Trump’s first term, Michael Dell was already in the White House orbit, joining other CEOs in on  Trump’s Manufacturing Jobs Initiative and publicly describing a meeting with the president as a discussion about growing the U.S. economy. Later that year, Dell stayed in Trump’s manufacturing council even as other executives broke away after Trump appeared to defend white nationalists in Charlottesville.