Corruption All the Way Down

If you're the president I guess blatant insider trading is quasi-legal now?

Photo by Adam Śmigielski on Unsplash

Over the weekend I finally finished Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change. I had seen some highlights in myriad excerpts but the effect of reading it all in one book was sobering, to say the least. It was like reading a concentrated excerpt of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, only with even dumber and more arrogant people making all of the important decisions.

Equally sobering was the way that Haberman and Swan described the Trump White House’s attitude towards corruption:

The overlap of business relationships and government work, once a source of consternation for first-term Trump officials, was now an accepted part of Trump’s new administration. White House officials generally shrugged off news accounts of conflicts of interest….

To the extent anyone in the White House thought about the overlapping public and private relationships in the first year of the term, they were seen as an asset….

In the years between his presidencies, Trump had come to believe he had been too accommodating of long-established norms….

“I prohibited them from doing business in my first term, and I got absolutely no credit for it,” Trump complained in a New York Times interview in early 2026, talking about his sons. “I didn’t have to do that. And it’s really unfair to them.” He added, “I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to.”

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World wrote last week about the massive corruption during Trump’s second term. And yet that column might have missed the most egregious example to date, which is the Trump family’s effort to legitimize the monetization of inside information.

Last month the AP’s Bernard Condon reported that Trump’s media company was considering a new and uniquely corrupt way to monetize Truth Social posts:

President Donald Trump’s media company is planning to charge for special high-speed access to Truth Social posts, including possibly his own affecting national security and financial markets.

The move announced Thursday would allow Wall Street trading firms and other institutions to get news from top Truth Social contributors in milliseconds so they could profit off subsequent moves in stocks, bonds and interest rates.

Called Truth PSI, the new service comes amid a flurry of other deals by Trump and his family company that critics say are exploiting the presidency for profit. It follows similar offers of paid access on rival platforms, though with one key difference: The most popular Truth Social poster is the president himself and, as the biggest shareholder of the public traded parent company, would directly benefit.

“He’s selling expedited, privileged access to information about what he is doing as president,” said Kathleen Clark of Washington University School of Law and an expert in government conflicts of interest rules. “It’s yet more brazen corruption, an improper exploitation of government power to enrich himself.”….

Conflict of interest laws would bar U.S. government officials from owning a company that profits off their office by selling access to their decisions through public posts, says Washington University’s Clark. But the president and vice-president, she notes, are excluded from the provision.

Despite that, all presidents since the law was passed decades ago have acted as if it applied — selling individual stocks, dumping business holdings or putting their financial assets in a blind trust so they wouldn’t know what was being bought and sold on their behalf while they wielded power — but Trump has refused.

The only thing Condon got wrong in his reporting is that the new service wound up being called Trump API instead of Trump PSI.

Whatever it’s called, it sounds like the literal auctioning off of insider information to investors. This raises the question of whether it’s illegal as well as blatantly unethical. Reuters offers some analysis on this question:

The ⁠Truth API arrangement would be “wildly unethical,” said Donald Sherman, president of the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, because the president ⁠stands to benefit from payments for faster access to his posts. However, it is difficult to determine from publicly available information whether it ⁠is illegal, he said.

Sherman and other experts note that the Constitution’s emoluments clauses, designed to thwart corruption, would not apply in this case. They bar federal officials from accepting gifts from foreign governments without congressional approval, and the president from receiving gifts from states.

And ​while federal regulations broadly prohibit the buying or selling of a security based on material, ‌non-public information, that restriction would not apply if potentially hundreds or thousands of people receive earlier access to his posts, Sherman said.

“I don’t think Congress or any regulatory body ever contemplated that a president or a market-mover would engage in this kind of paying-for-access type arrangement,” he said.

PBS’ News Hour Bobby Allyn also asked around, and I’m just gonna quote what he said:

I talked to the spokeswoman for the Trump Media Company, and she says all these accusations of insider trading, all these accusations that we’re offering material nonprofit information to traders are completely false because it’s public information.

But, again… I talked to many people who study Wall Street and former SEC enforcers who said, no, this is not public information because the very service is offering it to people before the rest of the world. I mean, that is the value add. You can get Trump’s posts before anyone else.

So experts told me that is the definition of material nonpublic information, and one executive at a very large Wall Street firm told me, if this was any other administration, this would be considered criminal. And I put that to the Trump media spokesperson, and she said that is absurd.

Just so we’re clear, at this point Trump’s family is approving something that is blatantly unethical and possibly illegal. Because he’s not hiding anything about it, however, Trump and his team clearly believe they can brazen their way through this.

The thing is, if this New York Times story by Matthew Goldstein is accurate, then Trump is in financial and legal hot water:

Last month, the overall number of monthly visitors to Truth Social was down about 36 percent from a year ago, according to estimates by the online tracking firm Similarweb. Monthly visitors to the site fell by a slightly greater amount in June, compared with last year. By contrast, much bigger social media platforms such as X and Threads have posted higher numbers of visits this summer….

“I have been following traffic to Truth Social for years, and I am really struck by the steepness of the plunge,” said Howard Polskin, who publishes a newsletter called theRighting, which tracks the right-wing news media. “When you think of how much Trump uses Truth Social as a megaphone you would think the numbers would be skyrocketing.”….

In a conference call on Monday, Kevin McGurn, the company’s interim chief executive, said Trump Media had signed up more than 10 customers, mostly trading firms, for the fast feed of the Truth Social posts. But he said the company was also having conversations with several new organizations.

Mr. McGurn said the criticism of the fast feed product was misplaced. He said customers were simply getting access to “publicly available posts” but “fractionally” faster than everyone else. He said this was a “well-established business practice.”

Trump Media is betting that more trading firms will want faster access to Truth Social given the ability of the president’s posts to move markets.

That last paragraph is perfection, because it puts the lie to McGurn’s claims about this being a “well-established business practice.” And if the number of customers stays at only 10, then it sure seems like it would be illegal.

But the story also reveals that Trump’s family is taking this likely illegal action because his company is facing the same challenge all of conservative media is facing right now: a hemorrhaging of the audience. And the only comparative advantage that Truth Social can offer is temporary inside information.

Beyond Trump’s business difficulties, one has to wonder whether this kind of attempted corruption will affect his party’s midterm performance. Recently, Axios reported that despite the approaching midterms, Trump was persisting in prosecuting the Iran war, levying tariffs, and building monuments in his own honor: “These three topics chew up much of Trump's time and attention. All three are widely unpopular in polls.”

As it turns out, Trump has more unpopular moves up his sleeve, like his ridiculous revisions to children’s vaccines.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is disgusted by pretty much all of these moves. The brazen corruption described above, however, may wind up being the thing that sticks with voters the most.