Trump's Media Company — Which He Owns Nearly 60% Of — Will Sell Wall Street a Millisecond Head Start on His Own Market-Moving Truth Social Posts for Up to $100,000 a Month, Letting High-Frequency Traders Trade on Presidential Announcements Before the Public Even Sees Them

Presidential announcements have always been public property — released to everyone at the same instant, free, so that no one can trade on the government's decisions before the rest of the country learns of them. Trump's media company just put that principle up for sale.

The product

Trump Media & Technology Group unveiled "Truth API" — a paid, licensed data feed engineered for one purpose: to give banks and trading firms "the fastest" possible access to posts from the 10 most influential Truth Social accounts, of which the president's is, in the company's own framing, "by far the most prominent."

The feed delivers those posts to paying subscribers up to a thousandth of a second before they reach the public through the ordinary app. In ultra-high-frequency trading, a millisecond is an eternity — long enough for an algorithm to buy or sell before the market has digested a market-moving sentence from the President of the United States.

• Price: up to $100,000 per month, or $60,000 a month on a three-year commitment
• Launch: August 1, 2026
• Customers: the company says it has already signed up subscribers — high-frequency trading firms and financial news organizations
• Target: the algorithmic traders "most impacted by the cost of a delay in information"

Why a head start is worth a fortune

The product only makes sense because Trump's posts are, routinely, the most valuable market signals on Earth. The record is recent and quantifiable:

• April 2, 2025 — "It's Liberation Day in America." The tariff rollout helped drive stocks down nearly 5%, sending investors fleeing to safe havens
• Days later — "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!" Trump announced a 90-day tariff suspension. Stocks surged 9.5%, adding roughly $4 trillion to S&P 500 wealth. (That post, at the time, itself drew accusations that the president had handed a buy signal to anyone paying attention.)
• June 24, 2025 — "THE CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT!" Oil prices plunged instantly

Now imagine receiving each of those a full millisecond early, with a machine wired to trade on it. That is precisely the edge Trump Media is selling — and the seller is the family of the man writing the posts.

The exemption that makes it "legal"

For any other federal official, this would be a straightforward crime. The primary conflict-of-interest statute bars government officials from owning a company that profits off their office. But the law contains a carve-out: the president and vice president are explicitly exempt from that provision — a loophole written on the assumption that no president would be shameless enough to need it.

Trump owns roughly 60% of Trump Media — a stake worth about $2 billion on paper even now. Those shares sit in a revocable trust controlled by his son Donald Trump Jr. "Revocable" is the operative word: Trump can reclaim it at will, and he remains the beneficiary. Every dollar the Truth API collects flows toward a company the president overwhelmingly owns.

Conflict-of-interest expert Kathleen Clark of Washington University School of Law:

"He's selling expedited, privileged access to information about what he is doing as president. It's yet more brazen corruption, an improper exploitation of government power to enrich himself."

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette of the Project on Government Oversight: "It's odious, selling access to the highest bidders." Ethics experts described the arrangement as a threat to the basic functioning of a democracy — because it converts what used to be equal public access to government decisions into a tiered product, where the wealthy get the president's words first and everyone else gets what's left.

The tell: a failing company reaching for the one asset that pays

The timing is not incidental. Trump Media is in trouble. Its stock (ticker DJT) is down roughly 70% since Trump took office, closing around $9.66 against a pre-inauguration price near $40. The company's losses have topped $1 billion, and its leadership has churned — former congressman Devin Nunes, who was paid $47 million in 2024, was pushed out as CEO amid the collapse.

A media company with few users and no profits has discovered that its single reliable, market-beating asset is not content, or advertising, or subscriptions. It is the president's official communications — the market-moving power of the office itself. So it is selling that. The company declined to say whether Trump's own posts would be excluded from the feed. The obvious answer is that excluding them would destroy the product; the entire value proposition is Trump.

What it actually is

Strip away "Truth API" and "licensed data feed," and the transaction is this: the President of the United States, through a company he owns, is charging Wall Street's fastest traders up to $100,000 a month for a head start on his own government announcements — tariffs that move trillions, ceasefires that move oil, decisions that move the world. The people who can pay will trade on his words before the public can read them. The people who cannot will be, structurally and by design, a millisecond too late.

It is the purest expression yet of a presidency run as a revenue stream: not a bribe hidden in a contract or a gift wrapped as diplomacy, but the office's own outputs — the president's official statements — packaged, priced, and sold to whoever will pay the most for the first look. The loophole says a president may. Everything else about it says a president never should.