President Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform began selling Wall Street traders paid early access to his posts on Saturday, a service that critics say raises serious insider trading and ethics questions because the president’s statements regularly move global markets, The Associated Press reported.
Trump knows the world hangs on his every word, and now he is charging for a sneak peek. The subscription product gives traders a fast-speed feed of his posts, similar to services sold by other social media firms, but with a crucial difference: Truth Social does not merely distribute the news, it makes it, since Trump uses the platform to announce policy on everything from war to central bank leadership to tariffs.
“If this was the CEO a public company, this would be jail time,” said Irene Aldridge, head of Able Alpha Trading, which does not plan to buy the service. “We have a President of the United States who has the front seat to all the action, who makes all the decisions, and he’s disclosing this ahead of time to a select group.”
Trump’s press office declined to comment on the propriety of the service and whether White House lawyers vetted it, referring questions to Trump Media & Technology, the publicly traded parent company. TMTG issued a statement blasting Democratic critics for mischaracterizing the service “out of ideological opposition to free markets or a failure to grasp the distinction between public and nonpublic information – or, quite possibly, both.”
Just this month, Trump has threatened on Truth Social to slap higher tariffs on Canada, kill a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia and widen the Iran war. With advanced knowledge, traders betting on a plunge in the Canadian dollar, a drop in nuclear energy stocks or a jump in oil futures could have reaped big profits, the AP noted. The president has sent stocks, bonds and currencies soaring and plunging with his online musings, creating opportunities for high-frequency traders that buy and sell within milliseconds.
The launch follows weeks of scrutiny over the arrangement. The Guardian reported in July that critics denounced the plan as “brazen corruption,” and The Intercept on Saturday called the Truth Social API “a blatantly corrupt favor to Wall Street.” Ethics experts say the service gives a select group of paying clients a head start on information that moves trillions of dollars in markets.
Trump Media says critics are simply not capitalist enough and that the service treats all subscribers equally, with the same feed available to anyone who pays. The company framed the criticism as a misunderstanding of the difference between public and nonpublic information.
The development adds to a pattern of the president’s businesses overlapping with his official duties, and it is likely to draw renewed scrutiny from Congress and regulators as the midterm campaign season intensifies.
Sources: Associated Press, The Intercept, The Guardian
Author: USA Desk
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