NEW YORK (AP) — The nation’s first billionaire president may soon be generating income from a brand-new revenue stream directly tied to his time in office: charging Wall Street traders for a head start on certain posts made to his Truth Social platform.
Trump’s financially troubled media company has announced plans to offer financial trading firms and institutions the ability to view posts from the platform’s “highest-ranking” accounts — potentially including the president’s own — a matter of milliseconds before the general public sees them.
For those traders, that tiny window of time could translate into enormous profits. And for Trump, it could mean significant new income.
Trump’s posts have repeatedly demonstrated the power to shake financial markets, sending prices sharply higher or lower within moments. Until now, announcements from the White House have generally been treated as public information — something that should be freely available to everyone at the same instant.
The president holds the largest following on Truth Social, with 12.9 million followers, making it likely his account would be among those included in the early-access offering.
Truth Social’s publicly traded parent company, Trump Media & Technology, did not respond to questions submitted by email — including whether the president’s own posts would be part of the service. But the planned offering has drawn significant attention, and not only from the financial world.
“It’s odious, selling access to highest bidders on Wall Street,” said Dylan Hedler-Gaudette, a federal ethics expert at watchdog organization Project on Government Oversight. “Everything he says has market implications.”
The service, dubbed Truth PSI, was unveiled in a brief press release on Thursday. It would allow trading firms to view select posts before ordinary users, giving them the opportunity to act on market-moving information ahead of the crowd — whether that involves stocks, bonds, or interest rates.
Trump Media’s announcement did not disclose the anticipated size of this new business, but it quoted CEO Kevin McGurn saying he expects it to become a “meaningful” source of revenue as part of a broader strategy to “monetize proprietary assets.” The company said it expects to launch the service next month.
The target customers are high-frequency traders — firms that rely on reacting to news faster than anyone else to buy and sell financial instruments. In that world, fractions of a millisecond can be the difference between a gain and a loss.
When Trump unveiled sweeping tariffs on April 2 last year, the announcement was a major market event — and many people learned about it first through Truth Social.
“It’s Liberation Day in America,” Trump posted hours before a formal Rose Garden ceremony, causing stocks to drop nearly 5% over the following hours, while safe-haven assets like gold and Treasury bonds climbed sharply.
Several days later, Trump reversed course, announcing a 90-day suspension of those tariffs — again via Truth Social — writing, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!”
Markets surged 9.5% that day, adding $4 trillion to investor wealth as measured by the S&P 500 index.
“It’s yet more brazen corruption,” said Kathleen Clark of Washington University School of Law, an expert in government ethics rules. “Trump can line his pockets by selling access.”
Trump has used Truth Social to announce a wide range of major decisions, including personnel changes, immigration enforcement actions, and developments related to conflicts in Ukraine and Iran.
“THE CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT!,” he posted on June 24 last year regarding a short-lived agreement with Iran, causing oil prices to drop immediately.
No other social media platform carries comparable access to the sitting president, and banks and trading firms will presumably be required to pay a premium for that advantage.
Trump Media did not disclose a price in its announcement, but confirmed it has already secured customers for the service.
While similar early-access services exist at other social media companies, the key distinction here is that the account in question belongs to the President of the United States. Still, there appears to be no legal barrier preventing Trump from proceeding.
Federal conflict-of-interest laws would prohibit most government officials from owning a company that profits by selling access to their official decisions — but those laws specifically exempt the president and vice president, according to Clark.
Even so, every president since those laws were enacted decades ago has voluntarily acted as though the rules applied to them — divesting stocks, selling off business interests, or placing assets in a blind trust. Trump has declined to follow that tradition.
The White House directed reporters’ questions — including those about the president profiting from his office — to the company that owns Truth Social. Multiple messages to Trump Media & Technology went unanswered, and Trump’s own family business, the Trump Organization, declined to offer any comment.
Trump himself has consistently maintained that there is no conflict between his duty to act in the public interest and any financial benefit he may derive from the presidency. The White House has previously stated that Trump acts solely in the country’s best interest and is not involved in his family’s business operations.
Truth PSI is the latest attempt to breathe life into Trump Media, whose stock has tumbled more than 70% since the president returned to office earlier this year. The company has tried expanding into cryptocurrency, financial services, and nuclear fusion — none of which has reversed the decline.
The company recently replaced its longtime CEO, former Congressman Devin Nunes, with McGurn, but the stock has continued to fall regardless. Shares rose 0.6% on Thursday following the announcement, and gained slightly less than that the following day, closing at $9.66. Before Trump took office last year, the stock had closed at $40.
