Trump’s Truth Social API Is a Blatantly Corrupt Favor to Wall Street
· The Intercept
For the low, low price of $100,000 a month, the ever-oxymoronic Truth Social is now selling direct access to its most important posts — or, in the firm’s preferred parlance, “truths” — to Wall Street. That’s an expedited lane to access statements and data from the president of the United States and other government officials, which have significant potential to move financial markets, ahead of us suckers in the general public.
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This sort of product, called an Application Processing Interface, or API, is not a particularly unusual offering for a social media company in the abstract. But Truth API, which launched today, is uniquely positioned to fuel blatant presidential graft.
The move has been rightly called “brazen corruption,” “the president’s most desperate grift yet,” and a “clear and unacceptable pathway for corruption.” In a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Sens. Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren called the offering “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.” All of that is true, but Truth API doesn’t stop at creating a new pathway to funnel de facto bribes to Trump; it also seeks to functionally merge the provision of a public good with a for-profit company.
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It has become de facto administration policy for high-ranking government officials to make official announcements on Truth Social without going through traditional press offices. Trump has also set a new standard for blurring the lines between his communications as a public official and a private citizen.
For nearly half a century, communications from the president have been recognized as the property of the United States, not the president himself. Under the Presidential Records Act, any documents (with some carve-outs for national security and personal records like journals and diaries) that are “created or received by the President … in the course of conducting activities which relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President” are subject to the United States’ “complete ownership, possession, and control.”
Selling expedited access to Trump’s statements is effectively privatizing a public asset.
In other words, selling expedited access to such statements is effectively privatizing a public asset. That might be part of the reason why, this spring, Trump’s Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion that argues the heretofore uncontroversial Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional.
Trump owns a 41 percent stake in Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group. In December 2024, all of his shares were transferred into Trump’s revocable trust, which is overseen by Donald Trump Jr. At the time, it was a 52 percent stake, worth about $4 billion against the company’s total valuation of $7.5 billion. Those TMTG shares (which are of course traded under the narcissistic ticker DJT) represent a major part of the president’s total wealth. While his stake in the company is now valued at (only!) $1.2 billion, it still represents 18 percent of Trump’s overall wealth, which Forbes estimated to be $6.5 billion.
And while Truth Social has become a pillar of the Trump business empire, it is also a pillar of sand. Truth Social hemorrhages money: In 2024, it only brought in $3.6 million and had a net loss of more than $400 million. Last year was even worse: Revenue ticked up slightly to $3.68 million, but its net loss soared to more than $700 million. The company’s value is now less than one-fourth of what it was in its spring 2024 heyday. That’s a lot of money on board a sinking ship.
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TMTG tried to find income streams from branching out into prediction markets, cryptocurrency issuing, bitcoin investment, and nuclear energy production (perhaps a nod to Trump’s physicist Uncle John). But none of these maneuvers have stopped the bleeding.
This latest plan to sell the API might finally be the path to profitability that TMTG so desperately needs. At its core, what an API does is provide a data feed directly into a particular software program, in this case financial trading terminals. So even though the company insisted to the Wall Street Journal that “Truth API is designed to deliver posts the instant they are made public to everyone, not before,” it still represents priority access to government officials’ statements because anyone not paying for the service will be unable to process the information at the same pace as subscribers, letting professional traders and hedge funds outpace the market and reap the benefits.
In modern financial markets, an advantage of even fractions of a second can be decisive — and can provide the opportunity to reap huge profits. This is the sitting president directly selling financial powerhouses a significant edge from the very heart of the federal government for a cool $100,000 a month (or a paltry $60,000 if you opt for a multi-year subscription!).
This entire sordid arrangement already reeks of corruption, but the stench grows stronger when juxtaposed with this administration’s propensity to mistakenly, illegally, and/or prematurely release information when they aren’t supposed to, and not infrequently on Truth Social. Trump’s presidency has always been defined by the degradation of our sense of shared reality and by rampant corruption. There’s no better metaphor than sticking a price tag on the “truths” coming out of the administration.
The post Trump’s Truth Social API Is a Blatantly Corrupt Favor to Wall Street appeared first on The Intercept.