Donald Trump’s latest scheme to monetize his presidency — selling Wall Street traders the right to an early peek at his posts on his Truth Social platform — has raised two important questions.First, isn’t this insider trading? And second, if it isn’t illegal, shouldn’t it be?Here are the short answers: Probably not. And yes, it certainly should be illegal, but may not be. This is probably not something that was ever contemplated by the insider trading laws, the STOCK Act, or the general rules about government employees and their use of government information for personal profit. — 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, is selling “real-time” access to Trump’s Truth Social posts. In effect, this will give buyers of the service an advantage of seconds or milliseconds, knowing what Trump is posting on Truth Social before their rivals do. For high-frequency or algorithmic traders on Wall Street — the customers TMTG is targeting — even the slenderest time advantage could translate into millions of dollars in gains. Get the latest from Michael Hiltzik Commentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize winner. By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service, which include arbitration and a class action waiver. You agree that we and our third-party vendors may collect and use your information, including through cookies, pixels and similar technologies, for the purposes set forth in our Privacy Policy such as personalizing your experience and ads. Trump Media has been anything but circumspect about its new service. “When @realDonaldTrump Truths [that is, posts on Truth Social], the world reacts,” the pitch sheet says, according to the FT. “No comparable signal exists.” The company even boasts that it plans to rake in cash from Trump’s posts. It says in its official announcement that the scheme will generate a “recurring revenue stream” and it expects the sales “to become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company.”“Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” said Kevin McGurn, Interim Chief Executive Officer of TMTG, in the firm’s July 16 announcement of the service. Buyers will get “a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths.” Previously, these users had to rely on “manual monitoring” of 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 posts anyone cares about are those of Trump himself.TMTG says it has already signed up customers for the service, which will launch Aug. 1, and that it will be “onboarding additional partners in the week ahead.” TMTG doesn’t say how much its data feed will cost, but the Financial Times has reported that the going quote has been up to $100,000 a month. Whether “real-time” access to Trump’s posts can produce a long-time revenue stream is open to question. Trump’s posts are valuable to investors because they focus on government policy. But as of Jan. 20, 2029, when he’s out of office and no longer has a grip on government policy, one would reasonably expect their value to collapse. So for TMTG, this is the time to strike. For the first quarter ended March 31, it reported revenue of $871,000 and a loss of $408.8 million. As Bloomberg’s Matt Levine points out, once it has sold just three APIs at $100,000 each, most of its revenue will be coming from selling Trump’s “Truths.”I asked the White House about the implications, legal and otherwise, of this service. They referred me to TMTG, which didn’t respond to my message.The legality of selling preferential access to official announcements such as Trump’s posts is murky. But on the surface it bursts the bounds of ethical skeeviness, defined by Merriam-Webster as “morally or physically repulsive: disgusting, sleazy.”Nor is this the first time Trump has moved to profit from his presidential perch. On July 1, his financial disclosure reports revealed that his income jumped to $2.2 billion in 2025, with $1.4 billion coming from various new cryptocurrency-related businesses — an asset class that his policies have promoted. “It’s bribery. It’s graft. It’s 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 patterns just before Trump’s policy statements have long raised suspicions of insider trading in Trump’s inner circle. I dashed cold water on that speculation last March . But in the wake of market turmoil following Trump’s announcement of global tariffs on April 2, 2025, and whipsawing follow-up statements over the subsequent days, I withdrew that conclusion. The opportunity for profiteering by anyone who knew what the next day, or even the next hour, might bring from the Oval Office was just too great.That brings us to the legal questions about the “Truth API,” the service being hawked by TMTG. (An “API” is an application programming interfacewhich gives software systems a direct connection with one another.)Start with whether it amounts to insider trading. The standard doctrine about insider trading, as represented by the 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 — say, corporate employees’ trading on information belonging to their employer. “The theory is misappropriation,” says Reneé Jones of Boston College, a former director of corporate finance at the SEC. “It’s fraud on the source of that information.” The question here is who owns the information embedded in Trump’s online postings. Arguably it’s not Trump, but rather the U.S. government or the American people. So his financial exploitation of his own decisions as articulated on Truth Social could be interpreted as a misappropriation of government property. Then there’s the 2012 STOCK Act, which forbids the use of nonpublic government information by members of Congress, their staffs and employees of the executive branch for personal gain if the information came to them via their official duties. The act applies to the president and vice president.“If Trump’s public pronouncements are his own personal property, he can sell information about them or do whatever he likes with them,” observes business law expert Ann Lipton of the University of Colorado. Trump’s posts, Lipton says, are “not Trump’s personal property; that’s information about actions taken by the president. … Trump is not allowed to trade on it, or tip others in exchange for personal profit.”In a scary aside, Lipton points out that this deal “gives Trump an incentive to post more market-moving information than he otherwise would,” since he has to keep posting to make the API thing look like it’s worth the money. “That gives him an incentive as president to change or disclose government policy based on what will move markets … rather than based on a calculation of what is best for the American people.”TMTG may have found a clever way to skirt the legal restrictions. According to its announcement, Truth API won’t provide access to Trump posts before they’re posted, but rather a “real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths” — in other words, as they’re posted. TMTG seems to be saying that it will be information that is already public, since Trump has already posted it. What the API’s buyers get is the advantage of accessing those posts instantaneously, rather than waiting for them to percolate into the marketplace.In any event, Trump’s involvement as the creator of government information, its disseminator and the seeker of profit through his private company makes the question of the API’s legality more complicated than the questions raised by most insider-trading or STOCK Act fact patterns. “This is probably not something that was ever contemplated by the insider trading laws, the STOCK Act, or the general rules about government employees and their use of government information for personal profit,” says Benjamin Schiffrin, director of securities policy at the investor advocacy nonprofit Better Markets. The policy issue here may not be whether Trump is breaking the law, but the extent to which the Truth API is providing yet another advantage for sophisticated market participants at the expense of everyone else. The financial markets present themselves as level playing fields, but it’s widely understood that they’re tilted toward sophisticated, rich players.Trump has never displayed much love for level playing fields — his career, indeed his behavior in office, has generally shown him to be a fan of tilting the playing field to his own advantage, or that of his friends or financial partners. Even if the Truth API is legal , it’s hardly a blow in favor of fairness. It’s just another way for Trump to fill his pockets while he’s still in the White House.
