“We will fight with every measure of our strength and with every ounce of our energy to lift up the working men and working women of America,” President Donald Trump said when he launched his reelection campaign in 2022.
Two years later, at the Republican National Convention, Trump made the same promise: “To all of the forgotten men and women who have been neglected, abandoned, and left behind, you will be forgotten no longer.”
The president should remember those words and ask Trump Media & Technology Group to reconsider its new Truth application programming interface.
Truth API is designed to deliver posts from Trump and other influential Truth Social accounts directly to paying customers. TMTG is marketing the service to organizations “most impacted by the cost of a delay in information,” including algorithmic trading firms. The reported price is as high as $100,000 per month.
Ordinary investors cannot afford that price. Hedge funds, high-frequency traders, and major financial institutions can.
That creates precisely the kind of two-tiered system Trump has spent his political career denouncing: one system for wealthy and well-connected insiders and another for everyone else.
TMTG argues that Truth API merely provides quicker and more convenient delivery of information that is publicly available. Technically, that may be true. But in modern financial markets, a difference of seconds or milliseconds can be extremely valuable. Algorithmic traders do not need secret information. They merely need to receive, interpret, and trade on public information before their competitors can react.
Trump’s posts are not ordinary social media commentary. He routinely uses Truth Social to announce tariffs, military decisions, negotiations, regulatory positions, and opinions about publicly traded companies. As TMTG’s own interim chief executive acknowledged, “markets already move on Truth Social posts.”
They certainly do. A Trump post announcing a tariff pause sent the S&P 500 soaring 9.5%. Other posts about European tariffs, foreign-made iPhones, Iran, oil supplies, and individual companies have produced immediate movements in stocks and commodities. Truth Social, therefore, does not simply report market-moving news. In many cases, it is where the president creates that news.
Selling enhanced access to such announcements risks undermining faith in American markets.
Small investors already suspect that Wall Street operates by a different set of rules. They know institutional firms possess faster computers, better data, larger research departments, and sophisticated trading systems. Truth API would add another advantage — a direct, machine-readable pipeline to the president’s preferred platform for announcing government policy.
The arrangement also creates an obvious conflict of interest. Trump retains a substantial financial interest in TMTG. The more consequential and market-moving his Truth Social posts become, the more valuable Truth API becomes to possible subscribers — and the more money his company may collect. The president selling access to news as he makes it is plainly corrupt.
Even without any improper coordination, the appearance is damaging. Investors may reasonably wonder whether presidential announcements are being turned into a private commercial product. Subscribers may worry that criticizing the administration could jeopardize their access. Competitors may feel compelled to subscribe simply because other firms have done so. TMTG, meanwhile, would retain the power to decide who receives access, how much they pay, and whether that access continues. The president should not allow such questions to arise and fester.
SPAIN’S SOCIALIST BORDER CHAOS
Trump won in 2024 by promising to challenge entrenched elites and defend Americans who believed the political and economic systems were rigged against them. Truth API threatens to hand the wealthiest a special advantage, financed by the market implications of presidential speech.
Trump should tell TMTG to suspend the product. The forgotten men and women should not have to pay $100,000 a month to receive presidential information on equal terms with Wall Street.