Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
President Trump, his critics like to say, learned one major lesson during his first term: Never leave any money on the table.
But even for a president who raked in $2 billion, fueled mostly by his lucrative cryptocurrency ventures, the latest offering from his social media platform, Truth Social, stands out.
Trump Media & Technology Group is now shopping to traders and investors a premium version of Truth Social delivering early access to the feeds of high-profile users, including the president.
Starting Saturday, for a fee of up to $100,000 a month, trading firms can access “Truth API” to get a glimpse of the president’s often market-moving announcements about economic policy and global affairs before the rest of the world.
Trump’s media company says customers have already started signing up. Such an offering would give institutional investors a leg up in areas of finance like high-frequency trading, where an advantage of a few milliseconds can mean the difference of millions of dollars. But will the service be widely adopted across Wall Street?
“It’s insane,” said one Wall Street executive, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration. “I can say for myself and 200 of my friends in finance, we’re not getting anywhere near this. In another administration, this would be considered criminal.”
NPR reached out to 12 other major players in finance, brokers, hedge fund managers and other investors. None would speak publicly about the service, with some saying the risk of landing in Trump’s crosshairs was too high.
Former SEC official says Truth API appears illegal
Securities experts, however, are drawing attention to the legal concerns surrounding the service.
Renée Jones, a Boston College professor and former top official at the Securities and Exchange Commission, said the paid offering appears to run afoul of insider trading laws.
She pointed to federal securities laws prohibiting schemes in which non-public information is misused to give a trader an unfair advantage. The law states that sharing such information is a breach of “a duty or trust of confidence.”
“So if the president’s Truth Social posts are being monetized, and if some people get special access to them, that’s misappropriated information,” Jones said. “And by giving people his posts early, he is also violating his duty of trust and confidence.”
Offering specialized data access to paying customers is not unusual or illegal for social media companies. But given that Trump regularly announces or hints at official government policy via Truth Social, the paid service could quickly run into legal problems, according to Jones.
She pointed to the 2012 Stock Act, which prohibits members of Congress and the executive branch, including the president, from trading stocks based on privileged information.
“That said, I could imagine Trump’s lawyers arguing that because they announced it out in the open, it’s not deceitful, it’s not fraudulent,” Jones said.
Shannon Devine, a spokeswoman for Trump Media & Technology Group, said in a statement that offering an early preview of posts from the president and others does not amount to insider trading.
“Truth API offers customers the fastest way to ingest publicly available Truth Social data. Critics must have invented a new theory of ‘insider trading’ based on publicly available information,” Devine said.
Democratic Senators demand SEC investigation
Democratic Senators have called on federal regulators to probe whether Truth API is indeed breaking securities law.
In a letter sent Wednesday to the SEC by Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Adam Schiff of California, the lawmakers called the service “an outrageous abuse of the President’s office for his personal benefit that undermines everyday investors and the integrity of our markets.” They asked the commission to launch an investigation.
The SEC declined to comment.
Trump Media & Technology Group spokeswoman Devine dismissed the letter as partisan wrangling.
“With no apparent sense of irony, certain politicians falsely accuse us of anti-free-market behavior while pressuring businesses into boycotting a product, all in a coordinated effort to harm a publicly traded company,” Devine said.
Trump is the largest shareholder of his media company through a trust controlled by his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., regulatory filings show.
That means the Trump family’s wealth will grow as customers sign up for Truth API.
It’s the latest example of the president blurring the lines between public office and his business empire.
“Channeling nonpublic information to Trump’s media company for high-speed dissemination to his wealthy institutional investors is a step toward normalizing insider trading that undermines the integrity of U.S. markets and further erodes investor confidence,” said Virginia Canter, a former SEC lawyer who is now with Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonprofit that has been critical of the Trump administration.
Canter added that the product “disadvantages regular investors who unfortunately may be on the losing sides of those trades because they do not have the same access to information.”
The Wall Street executive who requested anonymity asked: “Should he be able to monetize the office of the presidency like this? I don’t think so. But will investment banks stick their neck out over it? Probably not.”
