The tweed-wearing professor saunters smugly across the front of the lecture hall, hands clasped behind his back. “Here’s a thought experiment,” he intones. “Suppose the President of the United States offers to provide early access to his public statements for a fee. Hedge funds form a line down Wall Street to sign up. Is there anything wrong with this?”
Of course, it’s not a thought experiment at all. President Trump’s media company is doing precisely this. On August 1, Trump Media launched Truth API, a service that charges $100,000 per month to access Truth Social posts from the president and other “leading accounts” milliseconds faster than the general public. (An API, or Application Programming Interface, allows software systems to connect with each other and exchange data.) Clients can then trade on information before it reaches the general public.
Back in the lecture hall, one student raises her hand. “Well, isn’t that illegal?”
Probably not. The payments are not intended, or likely, to alter the content of the president’s pronouncements (he’ll make money regardless). So they are hard to describe as bribes.
Further, most federal anti-corruption laws exempt the president, and he enjoys immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts anyway. The case’s ambiguity is underscored by the variety of legal theories being deployed: a lawsuit filed by The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation argues that Trump API violates the First Amendment, and leans on Banks v. Manchester, an 1888 ruling that judges cannot copyright their own decisions.
Congressional Democrats meanwhile have decried Truth API as insider trading. But that would require trades based on nonpublic information; here, public releases are simply arriving faster to customers willing to pay more. An endless variety of subscription services, and entire technology packages like the Bloomberg terminal, operate on similar premises. Twitter (now X), a direct competitor to Truth Social, began selling API access years ago. It’s completely legal and entirely normal.
On an August 10, 2026 earnings call, an unidentified executive asked the obvious question: “Regarding Truth API, how does the company respond to criticism that Trump Media is giving some traders in a market an unfair advantage by selling this access?” Truth Social interim CEO Kevin McGurn responded:
The criticism is misinformed, is the first thing I would say. Truth API provides machine-readable feeds of publicly available Truth posts from the platform’s top accounts in milliseconds. Our customers will get published and publicly available posts fractionally faster. Providing licensed real-time public data through commercial APIs is a well-established business practice, which we’re hopeful will deter scraping and other violations of our terms of service. We’re encouraged by the early demand for Truth API and we look forward to rolling out the product to other sectors, including retail investors.
Two weeks later, as the client list continued growing, McGurn went on CNBC to defend Trump Media against growing criticism: “The technology is a tried and true technology that’s been in the social media system for quite some time, more than a decade. So all of your big platforms run APIs into high frequency trading platforms, news and information services, prediction markets, you name it.”
For the high-frequency traders most likely to make use of Truth API (indeed, they say they have “no choice” but to), this is just one more advantage of exactly the kind that their business model is equipped to exploit. They take advantage of an ability to access and process information fractions of a second before others can, executing thousands of trades in the moments when they hold actionable market information others do not. High-frequency trading accounts for over half of total trading volume in America. As McGurn says, it is beyond normal.
Our students squirm in their seats now. This must be wrong somehow, but no one knows the answer. Why won’t the professor just tell them?
Even if not illegal, one might expect those market fundamentalists most passionately protective of the sacred transaction between consenting adults to have an account of the economic harm caused by this tomfoolery. But no, to the contrary, experts in the financial sector and ideologues in their think tanks defend it. High-frequency trading is good for markets, the argument goes, because it gets more usable information into the market, increases liquidity, and offers opportunities to boost returns on capital. By that logic, even if Congressional critics were able to demonstrate that Truth API constitutes insider trading after all, it shouldn’t matter, because outright insider trading is good. According to the Cato Institute, for example:
Every security transaction has a willing buyer and a willing seller. Moreover, much ‘insider’ trading is legal, such as hedge funds trading on their own research. Insider trading is likely to make markets more efficient by incorporating MNPI [material non-public information] into stock prices faster. According to a 1992 study, on both insider trading days and those leading up to the eventual announcement of information, pre-announcement price drift occurs. Were the market to remain static, investors would face greater risks as security prices would not reflect the true value informed by insider knowledge.
Freely transacted, more efficient, less risk. How is Truth API any different?
High-frequency trading, of course, provides none of the value its advocates claim. The information that high-frequency traders exploit is not usable to anyone without their infrastructure and thus disadvantages the slower investors they front-run, like smaller traders and pension funds. The liquidity that high-frequency trading ostensibly provides is usable only to themselves, and is often illusory, instantly withdrawn in the middle of active trading (“ghost liquidity,” analysts call it). It presents serious market stability risks. And, most fundamentally, it is pure rent-seeking: profit premised on nothing productive, simply shifting money from other, less sophisticated pockets into theirs.
High-frequency trading is just one of many rent-seeking strategies through which well-positioned people misapply their talents toward misappropriating the resources of others. How is Truth API different from, say, the schemes proudly constructed by hedge funds like Cliff Asness’s AQR to help the wealthiest Americans avoid paying taxes on their capital gains? It’s legal, isn’t it? Heck, as Asness notes, he has an obligation to maximize returns for his clients. Doesn’t Trump Media have that same obligation for its shareholders? Yes, says McGurn. “This was demand that came to us from the market,” he protested on CNBC, and “we wanted to make sure that we satisfy that demand in the most brightly lit way for us.” What else could they have done? The wealthy paying for access to the information and skills that other wealthy people can provide, to profitably maneuver a rigged system that average investors are not equipped to navigate, is as American as apple pie.
The students think they are beginning to catch on. The law has no way to check a corrupt president. The economic dogma of market fundamentalism doesn’t either. Maybe it’s a trick question, and the point is that Truth API is A-OK. They can proudly build their own careers and make their own fortunes the same way.
But from the back of the room, a freshman raises his hand. He lacks training in both law and economics, but he hazards a guess anyway. “Isn’t what’s wrong with this that it’s just wrong?”
“Ah,” the professor says with a smile.
The deeper outrage of Truth API is not the potential violation of an SEC regulation (though that would be bad), or a crimping of market efficiency (though even some market actors are quietly horrified). It is the simple (lower-case t) truth that leveraging public office for private gain is gross. Selling access to Oval Office social media posts is a betrayal of the public trust and a violation of the political virtue that we require from our leaders, if we are to enjoy the blessings of a democratic republic that commands the loyalty of its citizens.
Truth API is so disturbing because it really would be the ideal thought experiment, taking misguided ideas about both our economy and our democracy to their extreme, and yet we are now living in that extreme. We recoil not only from Truth API’s degradation of the presidency and the damage it does to our republic, but also from our recognition of its banality and of the intellectual architecture that justifies it as normal. Truth API is simply the logical next step for a perverted capitalism that has forgotten its purpose and does not expect our leaders in the public or private sectors to recover it. There is plenty of degradation to go around.
Wow. Stunning overall analysis, leading to an extremely frank conclusion about where we are as a society overall, unsullied by politicized whaddaboutism re: which tribe is doing the most wrongest stuff. Well done. I’m aboard.
Classic anti anti defense, ‘look at how bad all of you made us, Trump HAD to do it’. Remove any agency from Trump and republican law makers.