The Only Art Trump Has Ever Mastered

Since last week, the president has been selling a head start measured in seconds. His platform, Truth Social, now offers a product called Truth API, giving paying customers access to Trump's market-moving posts a split second before everyone else. According to reports, the service costs $100,000 a month. Who pays for seconds? The people running high-speed trading algorithms on Wall Street. If Trump announces new tariffs, a fresh strike on Iran, or says a few words for or against a publicly traded company, those few seconds are worth real money. TMTG, the company behind Truth Social, collects a monthly payday from it.

Read also our article: "A President for Sale: Trump Is Selling What a President Knows"

TMTG CEO Kevin McGurn said in a statement that the markets already react to these posts and that the new service turns the company's own content into a recurring, highly profitable source of revenue. Put plainly, the president is monetizing his own public statements. Trump owns 41 percent of TMTG, making him a direct financial beneficiary of his own actions in office. It's as if he were letting Wall Street pay him sacks of cash today for the executive orders he'll sign tomorrow.

And yet you find yourself staring at it, almost embarrassed that it still manages to surprise you. Because beyond all of this, the man is remarkably ordinary. He was never particularly bright, not even before his mental decline became obvious. His real estate career was mediocre, built mostly on inherited wealth and interrupted by multiple bankruptcies. He has no instinct for decency, and moral judgment seems completely foreign to him. He reached the White House twice, both times through extraordinary luck - in 2016 because of the Electoral College and an opponent damaged by the FBI director days before the election, and in 2024 because voters were furious over inflation that he himself had helped fuel, after Joe Biden withdrew following a disastrous debate performance in the middle of the campaign. His handling of the pandemic cost him the presidency in 2020. Turning congressional majorities into lasting legislation has always been beyond him. History will remember him as the worst president America has ever had.

The last ten years have seen him invent more forms of corruption than the previous 240 years of American history combined. Governing, on the other hand, barely seems to interest him anymore in his second term. There is hardly any legislative agenda left, aside from a constitutionally questionable attempt to reshape the American election system, a proposal that has no chance of surviving the Senate.

Foreign policy, which mostly consists of being humiliated by Tehran over the Strait of Hormuz, has effectively been handed off to Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Stephen Miller runs the mass deportation campaign with little meaningful oversight.

That leaves Trump with time for his two greatest passions. His effort to remake Washington in his own image has only been partly successful. The Kennedy Center no longer bears his name after a court ruling, a gaudy ballroom is slowly rising over the ruins of the East Wing, and a massive marble arch in his honor is planned outside Arlington National Cemetery, one that the next Democratic president will almost certainly tear down.

When it comes to enriching himself, however, there are no limits. He packed the Justice Department with his former lawyers, who in reality still serve him, destroying the department's independence that had existed since Watergate. Two years ago, the Supreme Court granted him absolute immunity for everything he does within the scope of his core presidential powers. It amounted to a blank check for bribery, kickbacks, and every other form of personal enrichment.

So he accepted millions from donors in exchange for pardoning white-collar criminals. Last December, the whispered price for a presidential pardon was said to be at least $1 million. He even pardoned a Democratic congressman whose family had asked for mercy, then publicly attacked him afterward for refusing to switch parties, a barely disguised offer of political quid pro quo. The man involved, Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar, denies any wrongdoing. Our reporting tells a different story. A more sophisticated operation works through another channel. Meredith O'Rourke, one of Trump's closest fundraisers, whom he reportedly calls the Princess of Darkness, has been collecting billions from major corporations. According to multiple accounts, she refers to him simply as "the Boss" and tells companies, many of which are desperately waiting for approvals from Washington, that "the Boss wants the money." The cash flowed freely - into the new ballroom, the planned presidential library, and much more.

Then came the business of trading favors through his own Justice Department. Trump's lawyers negotiated a fund supposedly created to compensate victims of political persecution under the Biden administration. In reality, it was a slush fund for loyalists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and were later prosecuted. Trump had already pardoned every one of them during his first week back in office. For himself, he secured retroactive immunity for past tax violations, disguised as protection from political persecution. One article of faith now governs everything: Trump cannot commit a crime, and investigating Trump is itself treated as a crime. Turning that belief into law proved more difficult than expected. Rare bipartisan resistance forced Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to abandon the fund, though not the immunity itself. Trump nevertheless insisted on making Blanche attorney general, and Republican senators will most likely fall in line. Corruption spreads the way a disease does - through proximity.

Public office belongs to no one. That is what separates it from private property. The moment someone begins selling it, the republic becomes personal property. The most powerful man in America reveals himself as the least free of them all, a prisoner of his own greed, forever stuffing a few more dollar bills into his shirt. Any honest person can only find it repulsive. And yet there is something astonishing about the sheer scale of it, much like watching Lance Armstrong dominate cycling, obviously doped and thoroughly corrupt, yet still fascinated by the outer limits of what seemed possible.

Even that, however, falls short of the true greatest of all time. Richard Nixon ordered the break-in at Democratic headquarters and had the Attorney General's wife kidnapped, all at a time when Congress still exercised real power, career civil servants still believed they served the public, and the Supreme Court still defended the Constitution. What a man of Nixon's genuine caliber could accomplish under today's rules is almost impossible to imagine. It would be like watching Lionel Messi score the winning goal every single night - except the sport would be bribery.