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When reports first surfaced that Trump Media was offering Wall Street firms a premium service for $100k/month for faster access to President Trump’s Truth Social posts, the reaction from many critics was immediate.
“This is insider trading.”
It sure felt that way to me.
After reading the reporting, looking at the lawsuit, and reviewing what legal scholars are actually saying, I think the issue is both more complicated and, in an important sense, more significant than that.
The insider-trading question deserves to be taken seriously. But it may not be the deepest question this arrangement raises. Let’s take a deeper look.
Is It Insider Trading?
Intuitively, it definitely feels like it’s insider trading. Paying subscribers are getting information that is not yet generally available and are using that information to make stock trades that earn millions. How is that not insider trading?
Several respected experts believe it is, or comes very close.
Richard Painter, who served as the chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, has argued that if the President is using a privately owned company to sell favored traders earlier access to market-moving government decisions, it raises classic securities-law concerns.
NYU economist Gian Luca Clementi went even further, telling Fortune, “This is insider trading by definition.” His reasoning is straightforward: sophisticated traders are paying for a systematic informational advantage that other market participants cannot obtain.
Former SEC official and Boston College law professor Renée Jones frames the issue somewhat differently. In her view, information that exists only because someone occupies public office does not belong personally to that officeholder. It is government information, and commercializing it for personal private gain raises profound legal and ethical questions.
Those are serious arguments, and they should not be dismissed.
But neither should the counterargument.
Trump Media responds that the service simply provides the fastest possible delivery of publicly available Truth Social posts. Once President Trump presses “Post,” the company argues, the information is public. Subscribers are merely paying for a faster technological connection, much like Reuters, Bloomberg, or a stock exchange offers premium data feeds to professional traders.
That argument will be tested in the courts. And the obvious rejoinder is this. No, it’s not “publicly available” in any real sense because if it was, no one would pay you a penny for it.
The “Public Information” Argument
Notice what Trump Media is really saying.
The information is public because, somewhere inside the system, the President has already clicked “Post.”
Legally, that may matter.
Economically, however, the entire service exists because the information is not yet effectively available to the market.
If every investor already possessed it, there would be nothing to sell.
No one pays $100,000 a month for information everyone already has.
The subscription has value only because, for those crucial moments, paying customers know something that almost everyone else does not. Whether that interval is measured in milliseconds or seconds is almost beside the point. The product exists because there is a window—however brief—in which subscribers possess a meaningful informational advantage.
That doesn’t necessarily satisfy the legal definition of insider trading.
But it does explain why so many people instinctively reach for that analogy.
Where the Reuters Analogy Breaks Down
The administration’s defenders point out, correctly, that Reuters, Bloomberg, and the major stock exchanges all sell low-latency information services.
They do.
But those companies are selling something fundamentally different.
Reuters gathers information.
Bloomberg gathers information.
The exchanges distribute information generated by trading on their markets.
Their business is collecting, organizing, verifying, and disseminating information created elsewhere.
They profit from journalism, technology, and infrastructure.
President Trump occupies a very different position.
When he announces tariffs, sanctions, military action, trade agreements, or major regulatory decisions, he is often not reporting government policy.
He is creating it.
That distinction is easy to overlook, but I think it is the key to understanding what makes this situation unprecedented.
What if the Supreme Court Did the Same Thing? Or the Fed?
For a while I thought this was really a debate about information.
I no longer think that’s true.
It’s a debate about public office.
Consider a thought experiment.
Suppose the nine Supreme Court justices formed a private corporation that they collectively owned.
The corporation announces a premium subscription service. For $100,000 a month, subscribers receive Supreme Court opinions a few seconds before they are released to the public. The subscription revenue flows not to the Treasury, but to the corporation and ultimately benefits the justices themselves.
Would anyone seriously defend that arrangement by saying, “Reuters sells fast news feeds”?
Of course not.
The objection would have almost nothing to do with timing.
The objection would be that the justices were personally profiting from the authority of an office they hold in trust for the American people—and for which the American people already pay them a salary.
The same thought experiment works with a federal judge. Or the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Imagine Jerome Powell creating a private company that charged hedge funds for early access to his interest-rate announcements. The problem would not simply be that some investors learned the news first.
The problem would be that the office itself had become the commercial asset.
That’s Why This Feels Different
I think that’s the conceptual breakthrough.
The federal government already compensates the President for performing the duties of the office. The Constitution fixes the President’s salary precisely because the powers of the presidency are public powers, exercised on behalf of the nation rather than owned by the individual who temporarily occupies the office.
That is why I think the deepest question here is not whether this fits neatly within existing insider-trading doctrine.
The deeper question is whether a President may separately profit by commercializing the powers and privileges that come with holding public office.
Reuters profits because it reports the news.
Bloomberg profits because it delivers financial information.
The stock exchanges profit because they operate markets.
But this subscription appears to derive its value from something none of those companies possesses: the President’s unique constitutional authority to make decisions that move markets.
Put differently, the subscription is valuable because of the presidency itself.
That is what makes this controversy so unusual.
Whether or not courts ultimately conclude that this is insider trading, the underlying constitutional and ethical question will remain.
Can the economic value created by holding the presidency become a private business asset while the President is still exercising the powers of that office?
That’s a question American law has rarely, if ever, been forced to answer.
MS Comment: This really riles me up but even as I feel that way, I also realize that this is just the latest in a long long line of ways Trump has monetized the Presidency. But there is a “blatant” quality to it that stokes a feeling of outrage. Oh well. I can try to help shine a light on it. Thanks for helping me do that.
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