Since an emboldened Donald Trump returned to the White House in January of 2025, he and his family have engaged in self-dealing and self-enrichment on an unprecedented scale. From the Qatari gift of a luxury, wood-panelled Boeing 747 to the five hundred million dollars that an investment fund controlled by a member of the royal family of the United Arab Emirates invested in a Trump cryptocurrency company; to the President attending a private dinner with investors in his $TRUMP meme coin (which has since collapsed in value); to Pentagon contracts being awarded to companies associated with Trump’s sons; to lucrative real-estate deals in the Middle East and beyond—the graft and the plundering have gone on and on, seemingly without any legal or political checks. Even in this sullied environment, though, the sight of Trump’s social-media company hawking instant access to his Truth Social posts around Wall Street for payments of up to a hundred thousand dollars a month somehow seems a bit different, or even shocking. “It is so unabashed and unapologetic,” Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, who directs government affairs at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, told me. “It’s such a brazen pay-to-play scheme. Literally, you have to pay to play.”

That you do. Last month, Trump Media & Technology Group, a publicly traded company in which Donald Trump is the biggest shareholder, announced plans to offer a new product called Truth API, which its interim C.E.O., Kevin McGurn, described as “a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths.” In retrospect, no one should have been surprised. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, said years ago that Trump originally ran for President “only to market himself,” and social media has been the primary tool that he has used. After January 6, 2021, when Twitter and Facebook suspended his accounts, he decided to create his own social-media platform, and, in February, 2022, Truth Social was launched. Despite Trump posting on it countless times each day, though, the site never really took off. Truth API apparently represents Plan B. Rather than trying to create a rival to X and Facebook, a formidable task, the strategy now is to commodify Trump’s individual Truth Social posts, particularly the most financially sensitive ones about things like tariffs, the Federal Reserve, and Middle East peace deals. To be sure, paying customers—or their trading algorithms—would have to wade through a lot of dreck to get to the valuable stuff, but for some market participants it could be worth it.

Despite protests from Democrats and ethics experts, Trump Media rolled out Truth API on August 1st. Last week, in an earnings call with Wall Street analysts, McGurn announced that more than ten customers had already signed up, most of them high-frequency trading firms, whose computer trading systems process huge amounts of data, and whose profits depend on them being ahead of the pack. McGurn also averred that Trump Media was talking to other potential customers, including hyperscalers, news organizations, and A.I. developers, and, in addition, it was working on a Truth API designed for retail investors. “Today, we’re in the early innings,” he said.

These developments prompted more cries of outrage, including one from the Democratic senator Mark Warner, who has introduced a bill that would ban social-media companies from selling fast access to accounts of government employees. Two media organizations—the Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation—filed suit in a New York federal court claiming that Truth API violates their constitutional right to access Presidential statements on equal terms with other press organizations and members of the public. “This brazen grift targets not only the markets but the First Amendment,” Seth Stern, the chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said. “It cannot stand.”

That remains to be seen. Ever since Trump was elected in 2016, he has been eagerly exploiting gaping weaknesses in the U.S. legal system: federal conflict-of-interest laws that largely don’t apply to the President or Vice-President; a presumption, which the Supreme Court validated in its dreadful Trump v. United States ruling of 2024, that a sitting President can’t be prosecuted for official acts; and a long-standing Department of Justice policy that it cannot indict or prosecute a sitting President. “They’ve discovered the cheat code,” Hedtler-Gaudette said, referring to Trump, his family, and his acolytes. “If you don’t care about the reaction, if you don’t care about public shaming, then you can basically do anything you want, because we have this strange legal framework that basically exempts the President from the law while he’s in office.”

As a corporate entity, Trump Media & Technology doesn’t enjoy any such protections, but it insists that it isn’t doing anything wrong. In the conference call, McGurn pointed out that other social-media companies already market A.P.I. feeds to other businesses. That’s true. For example, Elon Musk’s X offers various corporate subscription choices, including cheaper metered options and all-access plans that reportedly start at upward of forty thousand dollars a month. But Trump doesn’t post on X much these days. And Musk doesn’t hold a federal office—not anymore, anyway.

Evidently, Trump Media is clearly banking on its A.P.I. scheme to help turn around a social-media business that has been hemorrhaging traffic, money, and stock-market value. In July, the number of visitors to Truth Social was down by more than thirty per cent compared with the same month last year. In its latest quarter, Trump Media generated total revenues of just $1.7 million, but booked a loss of $238.1 million, much of which it attributed to a sharp decline in the value of its investments in bitcoin and other digital assets. Early last year, when crypto was riding high, the company made a disastrous decision to accumulate bitcoin on its balance sheet. More recently, it has pivoted in another direction—nuclear fusion. It’s in the process of merging with TAE Technologies, a California-based company that is trying to develop a carbon-free energy source by fusing hydrogen with boron. So far, these turnaround efforts have failed to reassure investors. Since the start of last year, Trump Media’s stock, which trades under the ticker symbol DJT, has fallen by about seventy-five per cent.

As anyone who has followed Trump’s business career knows, flapping around and racking up large losses isn’t anything new to him. Neither is cashing in on the Presidency. But is it possible that he’s gone too far this time? The White House claims he doesn’t have anything to do with the management of his businesses, which he placed in a revocable trust run by his son Donald Trump, Jr., and it has referred questions about Truth API to Trump Media. Many independent ethics experts are unimpressed by these assurances. “If I had been the White House counsel, or Trump’s private counsel, I would have said, ‘You can’t do this,’ ” Richard Painter, who served as the senior ethics lawyer in George W. Bush’s White House, told me. “The key facts are that Donald Trump owns a big chunk of Truth Social, and he’s getting a financial benefit from the company selling early access to the public announcements on his social feed. That runs up against the insider-dealing laws, which say you can’t give information or a tip to someone who then trades on it and gives you something valuable in return.” Although Trump posting policy announcements on Truth Social could well be official acts that fall under the immunity privilege that the Supreme Court granted to Trump, Painter said that “Truth Social providing preferential access to U.S. government information is not an official act.”

Even so, the veteran lawyer, who teaches at the University of Minnesota, is under no illusion that the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Department of Justice would ever pursue such a case while Trump is in office. But Painter thinks Truth API could still backfire because it potentially creates liability both for Trump Media and for any Wall Street firms that purchase it and place trades based on its contents. “A future S.E.C. or Justice Department could look into this,” Painter said. “And, before that, you could find a hedge fund on the other side of a trade suing and claiming it was based on tip-offs received in return for payments to a Trump company. It’s a very bad business going on here.”

It is a business that also highlights the abject failure of the U.S. political system to rein in Trump’s self-dealing. Obviously, Trump’s Republican enablers are primarily responsible, but Democrats can’t entirely escape blame, Hedtler-Gaudette told me. Back in 2021, after Trump’s first term ended, they held the White House, the Senate, and the House. “That was the moment to introduce post-Watergate-style reforms, and they whiffed,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “They decided to pursue other things.” Five years on, after the many outrages of Trump’s second term, Hedtler-Gaudette reported that some of his colleagues who track political graft are hopeful that the Washington political class finally stands ready, once the votes are there, to enact new anti-corruption laws, such as making the President and Vice-President liable to conflict-of-interest statutes that apply to ordinary federal employees. “Hope springs eternal,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “I see myself as an optimist, but I’m always prepared to be disappointed by the politicos.”

Trump, meanwhile, is working on a shorter time horizon. With two years and five months left in the White House, he’s busy making the most of it. In an interview with NPR, Brendan Ballou, a former federal prosecutor who founded the Public Integrity Project and who is one of the lawyers representing the media entities suing Trump and other White House officials, said the President is, in some ways, “the Picasso of corruption,” because he thinks of schemes that wouldn’t occur to others. The comparison is apt enough, except for one thing. Picasso had his Blue Period and his Rose Period. Trump’s work is all of one hue: green. ♦