President Donald Trump’s media company is planning to charge Wall Street trading firms and other institutions for special high-speed access to Truth Social posts, including possibly the president’s own, a move that would let them get news in milliseconds and profit off swings in stocks, bonds and interest rates.
The new service, called Truth PSI, was announced Thursday. It comes from a company already tangled up in a pile of deals critics say are squeezing profit out of the presidency itself. This one goes further. The most popular poster on Truth Social is the president, and as the biggest shareholder of the publicly traded parent company, he would directly benefit.
Who Gets the Fast Lane
A press release says the service would let traders see “the highest-ranking Truth Social accounts” ahead of others. That means the people with the money and the machines get first crack at whatever the president and his circle decide to post, while everyone else waits behind the velvet rope. The release did not say how much customers would be charged.
The president has the most followers on the platform, 12.9 million, followed by his oldest son, Don Jr., and, close behind, his son Eric. The company’s pitch is plain enough: turn political access into a product, then sell it to the market players who can squeeze value out of every word.
Kathleen Clark of Washington University School of Law, who studies government conflicts of interest rules, said, “He’s selling expedited, privileged access to information about what he is doing as president.” She added, “It’s yet more brazen corruption, an improper exploitation of government power to enrich himself.”
The company declined to comment on whether the new feature is profiting off the presidency. Truth Social’s public parent, Trump Media & Technology, did not respond to emailed questions, including whether the president’s posts will be excluded from the offering. Silence does a lot of work here.
Who Pays at the Bottom
In the past few months, Trump has used the platform to announce major decisions and musings about the Iran war, tariffs and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown in U.S. cities. Those posts aren’t just chatter. The article says the Iran posts matter because investors worry higher oil prices could keep stoking inflation and possibly force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates.
That’s the hierarchy in full view. A president posts, markets twitch, traders move, and ordinary people absorb the fallout through prices, rates and the broader economic squeeze. The people with the least power pay for the decisions made at the top.
Stock in Trump Media & Technology has plunged more than 70% since the president took office last year, erasing $6 billion in shareholder wealth. Those losses, along with billions more in investor losses tied to new Trump family crypto businesses, have drawn scrutiny after Trump’s annual disclosure showed he took in more than $1 billion in revenue last year in the same companies and offerings.
The Rules for Everyone Else
Conflict of interest laws would bar U.S. government officials from owning a company that profits off their office by selling access to their decisions through public posts, Clark said. But she noted that the president and vice-president are excluded from the provision. The law draws a line, then leaves the people at the top standing outside it.
Despite that, all presidents since the law was passed decades ago have acted as if it applied. They sold individual stocks, dumped business holdings or put financial assets in a blind trust so they wouldn’t know what was being bought and sold on their behalf while they wielded power. Trump has refused.
Trump Media has been trying to lift its stock price by branching into crypto, financial services and even nuclear fusion. It recently replaced its longtime CEO, former Congressman Devin Nunes, with a seasoned media executive, Kevin McGurn. In the release, McGurn called the Truth PSI move part of a “strategy to monetize proprietary assets” and said he expected it to become a “meaningful, ongoing source of revenue.”
Trump Media said it plans to start the service next month and that it has already signed up customers. The stock rose 0.6% to $9.63 on Thursday. Before Trump took office last year, it closed at $40. The market may call it a business move. The structure is simpler than that: power posted, access sold, profit collected.