Donald Trump holds up an image taken from his Truth Social account at an event about coal on June 4, 2026, in the White House in Washington, D.C. Photo: Julia Demaree/AP Photo
Dylan is a senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project, where she leads RDP’s Economic Media Project.
For the low, low price of $100,000 a month, the ever-oxymoronic Truth Social is now selling direct access to its most important posts — or, in the firm’s preferred parlance, “truths” — to Wall Street. That’s an expedited lane to access statements and data from the president of the United States and other government officials, which have significant potential to move financial markets, ahead of us suckers in the general public.
This sort of product, called an Application Processing Interface, or API, is not a particularly unusual offering for a social media company in the abstract. But Truth API, which launched today, is uniquely positioned to fuel blatant presidential graft.
The move has been rightly called “brazen corruption,” “the president’s most desperate grift yet,” and a “clear and unacceptable pathway for corruption.” In a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Sens. Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren called the offering “an outrageous abuse of the President’s office for his personal benefit that undermines everyday investors and the integrity of our markets, while enriching Wall Street and other wealthy insiders.” All of that is true, but Truth API doesn’t stop at creating a new pathway to funnel de facto bribes to Trump; it also seeks to functionally merge the provision of a public good with a for-profit company.
