By Charles C. W. Cooke
Wednesday, August 05, 2026
On Saturday, the Trump Media & Technology Group
launched a new commercial offering: A real-time feed on the Truth Social
website that will give paying institutions early access to certain high-profile
posts for between $60,000 and $100,000 per month.
There is no credible defense of this. The only reason
that anyone would want priority access to Truth Social is to gain priority
access to President Trump’s pronouncements on that platform. And the only
reason that anyone would want priority access to President Trump’s
pronouncements on that platform is to act on them for pecuniary gain. Trump
often uses Truth Social as the primary forum for his announcements — announcements
that include changes to personnel, the imposition or rescission of tariffs, key
foreign policy decisions, and more. These announcements are extremely useful to
financial institutions, and, in the age of high-speed trading, the faster those
financial institutions can obtain them, the more money those financial
institutions can make. Facilitating this access is not a byproduct of Truth Social’s
API offering; it is its core — perhaps its sole — purpose. Simply put:
President Trump is charging Americans a fee — a fee that, in part, goes into
his family’s pockets — for the privilege of receiving news about his official actions
earlier than those who do not pay.
If one lifts the layers of abstraction, it becomes
obvious how unequivocally corrupt this setup is. Technically speaking, the
beneficiaries will not gain the information they seek directly from Trump
himself, but indirectly, via an API (Application Programming Interface) whose
output will be processed by a bunch of semi-autonomous servers and acted upon
according to a set of predetermined parameters. But the results will be the
same as if Trump had personally picked up the phone. Good traders do not react
to the news on the fly; they have plans of action, which are to be implemented
if a war starts or ends, if taxes are raised or cut, if the Federal Reserve’s
next chairman is expected to be hawkish, dovish, or somewhere in between, and
so on. If, instead of using Truth Social as the middleman, President Trump
announced that, for a hefty annual charge, he would call a select group of
brokers at the stock exchange to inform them of his important decisions, and thereby
give them a head start in executing their plans, we would call that what it is:
corruption. Why not here?
The BBC notes
that Truth Social has not “directly said the service includes the account of
the president himself,” but confirmed only that it covers the “highest-ranking
Truth Social accounts.” But this is a distinction without a difference. Absent
an explicit promise to exclude Trump’s account, one must assume that it — as
the “highest-ranking Truth Social account” — will be included in the product.
And why wouldn’t it be, when it is the only account on that site — or, most
likely, any social media site — that customers would wish to pay for. To
observe that nobody in their right mind is likely to pay tens of thousands of
dollars for millisecond-level access to the thoughts of Truth Social users is
not to slander those users, but to home in on the obvious reality: Trump is the
product at Truth Social, and he is the product in this add-on, too.
Senators Warren and Schiff have described Trump’s plan as
“an outrageous abuse of the President’s office for his personal benefit that
undermines everyday investors and the integrity of our markets, while enriching
Wall Street and other wealthy insiders.” They are correct. Whether that abuse
is illegal within our thicket of inside-trading laws — and, indeed, whether it
is functionally prosecutable if so — is a tricky question. But it is certainly
a grave offense against honesty, transparency, and good government. If it has
any self-respect, Congress will respond to the president’s brazen provocation
by passing a law that renders his model flatly illegal. And, if that fails to
persuade him, it will impeach and remove him from office, the better to drain
the swamp.
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