Hiltzik: More scams at the White House?

Donald Trump’s latest plan to monetize his presidency – selling Wall Street traders the right to take an early look at his posts on his Truth Social platform – has raised two important questions.

First, isn’t this insider trading? And second, if it’s not illegal, shouldn’t it be?

Here are the short answers: Probably not. And yes, it should definitely be illegal, but it might not be.

This is probably not something that has ever been contemplated by the insider trading laws, the STOCK Act, or the general rules regarding government employees and their use of government information for personal gain.

— Benjamin Schiffrin, Better Markets

Here’s the deal: Trump Media and Technology Group, of which Trump owns 52% through a trust and which controls Truth Social, his online social media platform, sells “real-time” access to Trump’s Truth Social posts.

In effect, this will give buyers of the service a few seconds or milliseconds advantage, knowing what Trump posts on Truth Social before their rivals. For high-frequency or algorithmic traders on Wall Street – TMTG’s targeted clients – even the smallest time advantage could translate into millions of dollars in gains.

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Trump Media has been anything but circumspect about its new service. “When @realDonaldTrump reveals the truth [that is, posts on Truth Social]the world reacts,” says the pitch sheet, according to the FT. “No comparable signal exists.”

The company even boasts that it intends to raise money from Trump’s posts. It says in its official announcement that the program will generate a “recurring revenue stream” and hopes the sales will “become a significant and ongoing revenue stream for the company.”

“Markets are already moving on Truth Social posts,” Kevin McGurn, interim CEO of TMTG, said when the company announced the service on July 16. Buyers will receive “a live, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most impactful truths.” Previously, these users had to rely on “manual monitoring” from Truth Social, the company lamented.

Trump, who has 12.9 million followers on Truth Social, isn’t the only person posting “Truths” on the platform — his sons Eric and Don Jr. do too, among others. But let’s be serious: the only messages that interest people are those of Trump himself.

TMTG says it has already signed up customers for the service, which launches August 1, and that it will “onboard additional partners in the coming week.” TMTG doesn’t say how much its data feed will cost, but the Financial Times reported that the current quote is $100,000 per month.

It is questionable whether “real-time” access to Trump’s messages can generate a long-term revenue stream. Trump’s messages are valuable to investors because they focus on government policy. But as of January 20, 2029, when he leaves office and no longer has control over government policy, one could reasonably expect their value to collapse.

So for TMTG, it’s time to strike. For the first quarter ended March 31, the company reported revenue of $871,000 and a loss of $408.8 million. As Bloomberg’s Matt Levine points out, once it sells just three APIs at $100,000 each, most of its revenue will come from selling Trump’s “Truths.”

I asked the White House about the implications, legal and otherwise, of this service. They referred me to TMTG, who did not respond to my message.

The legality of selling preferential access to official announcements such as Trump’s messages is murky. But on the surface, it goes beyond the bounds of ethical malice, defined by Merriam-Webster as “morally or physically repugnant: disgusting, sordid.”

This is also not the first time Trump has attempted to take advantage of his presidential position. On July 1, his financial reports revealed that his revenues had soared to $2.2 billion in 2025, with $1.4 billion coming from various new activities related to cryptocurrencies – an asset class that his policies have favored.

“It’s corruption. It’s bribery. It’s the exploitation of public power for private financial gain,” Kathleen Clark, an expert on government ethics at Washington University in St. Louis, told my colleague Jenny Jarvie.

Trading trends just before Trump’s policy statements have long raised suspicions of insider trading in Trump’s inner circle. I threw cold water on this speculation last March.

But following the market turmoil following Trump’s announcement of global tariffs on April 2, 2025, and brutal follow-up statements in the following days, I have withdrawn that conclusion. The opportunity to enjoy the Oval Office was simply too great for anyone who knew what the next day, or even the next hour, might bring from the Oval Office.

This brings us to the legal questions regarding the “Truth API”, the service sold by TMTG. (An “API” is an application programming interface that allows software systems to be connected directly to each other.)

Start by determining whether it is insider trading. Standard insider trading doctrine, as represented by law and Securities and Exchange Commission policies, focuses on the use of material, nonpublic information belonging to those to whom the trader owes a duty of confidentiality – for example, employees of a company trade information belonging to their employer.

“The theory is misappropriation,” says Reneé Jones of Boston College, former director of corporate finance at the SEC. “It’s a fraud on the source of this information.”

The question here is who owns the information in Trump’s online posts. It’s probably not Trump, but rather the American government or the American people. Thus, his financial exploitation of his own decisions as articulated in Truth Social could be interpreted as misappropriation of government assets.

Then there’s the STOCK Act of 2012, which prohibits the use of nonpublic government information by Members of Congress, their aides, and executive branch employees for personal gain if the information comes to them in the course of their official duties. The law applies to the president and vice president.

“If Trump’s public statements are his personal property, he can sell information about them or do with them what he wants,” observes Ann Lipton, a business law expert at the University of Colorado.

Trump’s messages, Lipton said, “are not Trump’s personal property; they are information about actions taken by the president. … Trump is not authorized to use them, nor to tip others for personal gain.”

As an aside, Lipton points out that this deal “incentivizes Trump to publish more information about market developments than he otherwise would,” since he must continue publishing to make the API seem worth it. “This incentivizes him, as president, to change or disclose government policy based on what will move the markets…rather than based on a calculation of what is best for the American people.”

TMTG may have found a clever way around the legal restrictions. According to its announcement, the Truth API will not provide access to Trump’s posts before they are published, but rather a “real-time feed of the platform’s most impactful truths” – in other words, as they are published.

TMTG seems to be saying that this will be already public information, since Trump has already released it. What API buyers get is the benefit of accessing these publications instantly, rather than waiting for them to trickle into the marketplace.

Regardless, Trump’s involvement as a government information creator, disseminator, and profit seeker through his private company makes the question of the legality of the API more complicated than the questions raised by most fact-based models of insider trading or the STOCK Act.

“This is probably not something that has ever been contemplated by the insider trading laws, the STOCK Act, or the general rules regarding government employees and their use of government information for personal gain,” says Benjamin Schiffrin, director of securities policy at Better Markets, a nonprofit investor advocacy organization.

The political question here may not be whether Trump is breaking the law, but to what extent the Truth API provides additional advantage to the most sophisticated market participants, at the expense of everyone else. Financial markets present themselves as a level playing field, but it is widely believed that they are tilted in favor of wealthy and sophisticated players.

Trump has never shown much love for a level playing field – his career, and even his behavior in office, have generally shown him favoring tipping the scales to his own advantage, or that of his friends or financial partners. Even if the Truth API is legal, it’s not a blow to fairness. It’s just another way for Trump to line his pockets while he’s still in the White House.

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