President Trump's Truth API: Corporate and Securities Law Aspects

The legal issues

Trump Media & Technology Group¹ launched Truth API on August 1, 2026. According to Quartz:

The service, branded Truth API, is designed to push posts from Truth Social's highest-profile accounts to paying subscribers in near-real time, the company said. Trump Media has discussed charging up to $100,000 a month for access, with a reduced rate of $60,000 a month for firms committing to a three-year agreement, according to NBC News. …

“Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” interim CEO Kevin McGurn said in a statement. “Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream.”

Specifically, Truth API will make available early access to posts from Truth Social's ten most-followed accounts, including Trump's own.

The early access will only be on the order of milliseconds, according to Eciks, but that’s enough time for high speed traders to get a potential edge over retail and even many institutional investors.

Critics charge that this amounts to insider trading. Again, from Eciks:

Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff sent a letter to the SEC on July 29 calling Truth API “an outrageous abuse of the President’s office for his personal benefit that undermines everyday investors and the integrity of our markets.” They asked SEC Chair Paul Atkins to investigate whether the service violates laws prohibiting insider trading and market manipulation before its August 1 launch.

Renée Jones, a Boston College professor and former top SEC official, told NPR that the paid offering appears to run afoul of insider trading laws. “If the president’s Truth Social posts are being monetized, and if some people get special access to them, that’s misappropriated information,” Jones said. “By giving people his posts early, he is also violating his duty of trust and confidence.” She cited the 2012 Stock Act, which prohibits members of Congress and the executive branch from trading stocks based on privileged information.

FYI

It’s not accurate to say that the STOCK Act prohibits trading on the basis of “privileged” information. It required “[t]he Office of Government Ethics” to issue “interpretive guidance of the relevant Federal ethics statutes and regulations … to clarify that no executive branch employee may use nonpublic information derived from such person’s position as an executive branch employee or gained from the performance of such person’s official responsibilities as a means for making a private profit.” It defines executive branch employee to include the President.

Pursuant to that instruction, the OGE has promulgated 5 C.F.R. § 265.703(a), which provides that “[e]mployees may not engage in financial transactions using nonpublic information, nor allow the improper use of nonpublic information to further their own private interests or those of another, whether through advice or recommendation, or by knowing unauthorized disclosure.”

The STOCK Act also provides that, for purposes of SEC Rule 10b-5, “each executive branch employee owes a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to the United States Government and the citizens of the United
States with respect to material, nonpublic information derived from such person’s position.”

My book, Insider Trading Law and Policy (Concepts and Insights) (Foundation Press 2d ed. 2023), offers a comprehensive overview of insider trading law, including the STOCK Act. (AMAZON LINK)

So are the critics right?