The President Is Selling You Out — One Second at a Time
How early access to Trump’s "truths" will drain your retirement account
You may have heard that President Trump is selling early access to Truth Social posts through an API at a cost of $100,000 a month. (Okay, in the video, I think I say $100,000 per year. So this is worse.)
There’s a lot of technical stuff going on here, so I want to unpack it with you.
But spoiler alert: this is bad. Bad governance. Bad economics. And corrupt on its face.
What’s an API, and why is it worth $100,000?
All our computers talk to each other, all the time. The way they do that is called an application programming interface, or API.
Here’s what used to happen: President Trump typed his tweet — sorry, his truth — it went out over the internet, and a few seconds later it hit your phone and mine.
With this new API, here’s what’s happening now: President Trump types his post, and it goes out through a special pipe, faster, straight to Wall Street computers.
Now, it may only be a second faster – maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less. But don’t let the brevity of this fool you. It might sound like not much, but it’s a lot. Think about it this way: If the head start were a month, it would obviously matter — some people would know we’d just declared war on Iran, and some people wouldn’t. The informed traders would clean up, and the uninformed would get fleeced.
Well, a high-speed computer can do about as much thinking in one second as you and I do in a month. Because this API speaks directly to high-speed machines, the computer has time to read the post and ask: is this President Trump posting a shirtless photo of himself, or is he announcing that he’s about to bomb Iran?
If it’s the latter, the computer reasons: the rest of the world will hear this in a moment; in a few seconds the stock market will be worth a whole lot less; sell everything right now.
That’s the scheme. A select few get early access to market-moving information, and that access is being sold for $100,000 a month.
Who will buy it? Wall Street trading firms — specifically, the high-frequency traders whose computers are very good at reading text and turning it into trading strategies.
This is what selling democracy looks like
Now let’s follow the money. That $100,000 flows from Wall Street to Truth Social — a company in which the president is the largest shareholder.
The president is selling is something you and I own. A decision made by our White House, by our elected officials, paid for by our taxes, is being offered early — but only to people willing to write a six-figure check to a company owned in large part by the president himself.
To see the threat clearly, imagine you were a founding father.
The founders asked: how do we build a democracy people can trust? Their answer was transparency. When the government makes decisions that matter, they should publish them so everyone can see and hold their leaders to account. Later, we literally built a public notice board for this. It’s called the Federal Register.
Now picture the scene — I like to imagine it as a number from Hamilton. Someone proposes the public notice board, and some bloke stands up and says: “Actually, why don’t we sell early access to government decisions, and only to the select few who pay me $100,000?”
I reckon Alexander Hamilton would have told that guy to get lost.
You don’t sell access to a select few, and you certainly don’t route the money to a member of the administration. A democracy puts everyone on an equal footing. This scheme is a direct assault on that idea.
It’s corrupt on its face
The decision about whether the U.S. goes to war may come from the president’s brain, but he makes it in his role as our employee. We pay his salary. He works for us.
If you told your boss, “I know some inside information about this company, and I’m going to sell it on the side for personal profit” — you’d be fired on the spot. Yet that’s what the President — our employee — is doing. And the stakes are much higher when the employee is the president.
So here we have the president selling information that belongs to the public, through a private company in which he’s the majority owner. He is, quite literally, using the power of the presidency to enrich himself.
And here’s the kernel of dark genius in it: You never want to be on the wrong side of a trade. You never want to bet against someone who knows something you don’t. So once you — or some other investor — knows the other side of their trade might have paid $100,000 for early access to the president’s posts, the only way to stay level is to pony up.
That’s why reporters are already finding firms saying they’ll buy the subscription — not because they want to, but because once everyone else does, they have no choice. It’s a very clever way for the president to ensure the checks keep coming.
What’s this got to do with Teleprompter Guy?
Now let me come at the economics of all this sideways, via one of my favorite stories of the past few weeks. Congratulations to the writers, because you couldn’t script this better.
There’s a guy, Gabriel Perez, who works/worked as a technical assistant to the president, loading the president’s speeches into the teleprompter. And it turns out you can bet on prediction markets about whether the president will say a specific word in any of his speeches. (Will he say “Iran”? Will he mention “inflation”?)
The scandal: Mr Perez, aka Teleprompter Guy — the man feeding the president the very words he’s about to read — was betting in these markets. He’d see “I’m about to bomb Iran,” and then go bet that the president would say “bomb” and “Iran.” Unsurprisingly, he made good money — about $100,000. He also got caught.
Now, the economics question: would you bet on whether the president will say “Iran,” knowing Teleprompter Guy might be on the other side of that bet? Of course not. You’d lose almost every time. So you’d never enter that market at all.
Here’s the connection. A bet on a prediction market is just like buying a stock, or oil, or options — you’re buying a piece of paper that’s worth more if one thing happens and less if another does. Teleprompter Guy had an informational advantage: he knew what the president was programmed to say next.
Someone who pays $100,000 for early access to the president’s Truth Social posts has exactly the same advantage. And so the same logic follows: If you’re worried the other side of your stock trade is someone with API access to information you’ll learn later, you become unwilling to trade.
I can’t say whether trading based on this early access to the President’s latest thoughts and decisions is a violation of insider trading laws — you need to ask a lawyer for that. But I’m an economist, and I can say that this creates the same disease that insider trading laws are meant to prevent.
You might think that insider trading laws are about fairness, and to some extent that’s true. But the deeper economic rationale is this: once some traders are known to be better informed, everyone else pulls back. And if folks won’t trade, liquidity dries up, and people become less willing to invest in stocks.
Who pays? (Spoiler: You)
One last thing. Someone is willing to pay the president $100,000 per month for this access — so the information is worth at least that much. And I reckon these high-frequency trading firms will make much more than that. Maybe millions. Maybe billions.
Here’s the iron law of financial markets: if money flows to someone, it has to come from someone. And if you’re not one of the high-frequency traders exploiting this API, then it’s coming from you. Probably from your retirement fund, which is sitting in stocks right now.
To put it in the plainest possible terms: these firms are going to get rich, enabled by the president — and they’ll do so by taking money out of a 65-year-old’s account just as she’s looking to retire.
How are the media so deeply illiterate on these issues? Honestly, the coverage is dense and it shows they don't bother to do the hard work.
And if our systems were functioning properly, congress and the DOJ would be all over this. As it stands, who will pull the plug?