Meru unpacks a strange new product from Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG, ticker DJT), the company Trump founded and still owns 41% of. From August 1, 2026, its Truth Social platform will sell 'Truth API', a $100,000-a-month subscription ($60,000 on a three-year deal) that delivers posts from the platform's ten most influential accounts a thousandth of a second before they reach the public feed, in machine-readable JSON that trading algorithms can act on instantly. Those ten accounts are dominated by Trump himself, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and close allies. TMTG's own pitch deck sells the edge with ten 'market-moving' Trump posts: an April 2025 'THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY' hours before a 90-day tariff pause added $4 trillion to the S&P 500's value; an 'Iran blockade' post that spiked oil more than 9% in a day, and a later 'productive talks' post that sent it back down. Is it legal? US insider-trading law targets non-public information, and this data becomes public anyway, so TMTG argues it's clean, and while executive-branch officials are barred from such conflicts of interest, the President and Vice President are explicitly exempt from that rule (18 U.S.C. §208). The buyers are high-frequency traders, who already place about 60% of US orders and live or die on being first.
Why it matters · It puts a price tag on proximity to the president's market-moving posts, and shows retail is now outgunned on speed, analysis and information all at once.
Worth asking · Selling a head start on Trump's posts to HFT firms: clever business, or the market's playing field tilting for good?