Trump Accounts May Force MAGA Kids to Own NYT Stock

Here's the irony nobody in Washington seems to want to talk about: the administration's proposed "Trump accounts" — tax-advantaged savings vehicles pitched as a gift to American children — could end up parking MAGA families' money directly into shares of the New York Times, Disney, and every other company the right loves to boycott.

The problem is index funds. If Trump accounts funnel contributions into broad market indexes — which is the most logical, low-cost structure for a government-backed savings product — then kids get a slice of everything. That means the liberal media darlings, the ESG-happy banks, and the woke corporations that conservatives have spent years calling out. You don't get to pick and choose when you own the whole market.

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This isn't some fringe edge case. It's a structural inevitability. Any passive investment approach worth its fees will mirror the S&P 500 or a similar benchmark, and those benchmarks don't care about your politics. The NYT is in there. So is every other company that's ever landed on a boycott list. Your kid's government-seeded account could literally be a shareholder in the outlets and brands that drive the MAGA base absolutely crazy.

The political blowback writes itself. Culture-war branding collides head-on with basic investment math, and investment math wins every time. Either the accounts get loaded with actively managed, ideologically screened funds — which cost more and historically underperform — or conservatives hold their nose and fund the very institutions they rail against. There's no clean third option here.

This is the kind of own-goal that critics say almost anyone could have spotted coming. When you slap a political brand on a financial product but leave the underlying mechanics to the market, the market does what the market does. Continue reading at MarketWatch.com