The President Is Selling His Own Announcements to Wall Street, Down to the Millisecond

There is one sentence in Thursday's press release that already tells the entire story, and it didn't come from a critic. It came from the company itself. CEO Kevin McGurn said the goal was to monetize the company's assets. The asset in question is the presidency of the United States.

The service is called Truth PSI, and what it offers can be explained in a single sentence. Wall Street firms and financial institutions will be able to see certain posts from the platform's highest ranking accounts before everyone else does, allowing them to profit from the market movements that follow. Stocks, bonds, and interest rates are all part of the package. The target customers are high frequency trading firms whose entire business model depends on reacting to information faster than everyone else, where a few thousandths of a second can determine whether millions are made or lost. The launch is scheduled for next month. The company has not disclosed what the service will cost. It has disclosed that it already has customers.

That raises one obvious question: whose posts are they talking about? The press release refers to the platform's highest ranking accounts, and the highest ranking account on Truth Social belongs to the President of the United States. He has 12.9 million followers there, more than anyone else. When asked in writing whether his posts would be excluded from the service, the company did not respond. Sometimes silence is an answer.

Why milliseconds are worth money is something the president has demonstrated repeatedly over the past 18 months. On April 2, 2025, he posted that it was "Liberation Day" in America, hours before officially announcing his tariffs from the Rose Garden. Within hours, stock markets dropped nearly 5 percent while gold and U.S. Treasury bonds surged. A few days later he reversed course, again on Truth Social, announcing a 90 day suspension of the tariffs while telling everyone in all capital letters that it was a great time to buy. Markets climbed 9.5 percent that day, adding roughly 4 trillion dollars in investor wealth as measured by the S&P 500. On June 24, 2025, he posted in all caps that the ceasefire with Iran was now in effect and should not be violated. Oil prices immediately collapsed.

Personnel decisions appear through that account. So do new immigration crackdowns. Questions of war and peace involving Ukraine and Iran are announced there as well, usually in all capital letters. No other platform in the world has this kind of direct access to the head of state, and banks and trading firms are now expected to pay for it.

Until Thursday there had been one rule so obvious that almost nobody ever bothered writing it down. What a president announces belongs to everyone. It is free, and everyone receives it at exactly the same moment. That rule is now being fenced off and sold in pieces. Adam Smith, the patron saint of economists who complain about regulation today, wrote in 1776 that people of the same trade rarely gather together without the conversation ending in a conspiracy against the public. He was talking about merchants secretly coordinating prices. He could never have imagined a day when the government itself would be sitting at the table, selling the conspiracy as a subscription service.

Government ethics experts reacted accordingly. Selling access to the highest bidders on Wall Street is disgusting, said Dylan Hedler-Gaudette of the Project on Government Oversight, because everything this man says moves financial markets. Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University and an expert on government ethics rules, called it an even more blatant form of corruption. Trump, she said, can literally fill his own pockets by selling access.

Now comes the part that makes people uncomfortable. It is legal. Federal conflict of interest laws would prohibit any other government official from owning a company that profits from their office by selling access to official decisions. The president and vice president are exempt. The loophole has existed for decades, but until now no president has stepped into it. Every previous president behaved as though the rule applied to them anyway. They sold individual stocks or gave up ownership interests. Others placed their assets into blind trusts so they would not even know what was being bought or sold in their name during their time in office. Trump refused.

The difference from criminal insider trading comes down to one thing: who plays which role. An ordinary insider steals information belonging to a company and trades on it. Here the same man creates the information, owns the platform where it appears, sells early access to it, and profits from the company selling that access. Nothing is missing from the equation. Except the law.

Everyone involved has remained remarkably coordinated in their silence. The White House referred questions, including those about profiting from the presidency itself, to the company. Multiple requests for comment sent to the company went unanswered. The Trump Organization declined to comment. The president himself has repeatedly denied that there is any conflict between acting in the public interest and profiting from the presidency. The White House has previously insisted that everything he does serves the interests of the country and that he plays no role in the family's business operations.

The reason for the urgency is written directly into the stock chart. Trump Media shares have lost more than 70 percent of their value since he returned to office. The company has tried cryptocurrency, financial services, and most recently even nuclear fusion, none of which changed its fortunes. Longtime CEO Devin Nunes, the former congressman, was replaced by McGurn, and the stock continued falling. On Thursday, after the announcement, it rose 0.6 percent. On Friday it added roughly half of that, closing at $9.66. Before Trump's inauguration, the same stock closed at $40.

He is the first billionaire ever to serve as president, and he has found a business that only he can operate. The product is his own decisions. The price is measured in milliseconds. And if you don't pay, you'll simply find out later.