President Donald Trump’s social media company is charging clients up to $100,000 a month for priority access to Trump’s own official announcements and other “market-moving” government news.

There’s an obvious dollar value to getting a jump on government news. Trump’s posts about new tariffs and military actions do indeed move markets.

But is the new service legal? Is it ethical?

One thing’s for sure: Just a few years ago, it would have been unimaginable.

“I wonder if anyone ever envisioned a time when the head of a country would do something like this,” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at the George Washington University Law School.

Here’s how Trump’s posts wound up on Truth Social

Presidents, government agencies and corporate America used to announce news in releases posted on official websites and sent out as emails or, years ago, rumpled faxes.

More recently, however, governments and companies have taken to announcing news over social media: posts on X, formerly Twitter, or on official Facebook pages.

In his first presidential term, Trump became the most prolific Twitter poster in presidential history. One Boston Globe report counted 2,417 Trump tweets in the first 11 months.

But Twitter banned Trump in the final days of that term, citing a risk for “incitement of violence” after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Facebook, Instagram and other communication sites blocked Trump’s accounts, as well. Trump accused the platforms of silencing him.

For his second term, Trump migrated to Truth Social, a platform he controls. Trump owns the largest stake in Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, through a revocable trust, of which he is the sole beneficiary.

That means Trump communicates with the nation largely through a commercial social media platform, albeit one that has allowed everyone equal access to his posts.

Until now.

Truth API offers ‘real-time access’ to posts from Trump’s White House

Truth API, announced on July 16, promised to deliver “real-time access to posts from the highest-ranking Truth Social accounts,” a group dominated by Trump, his family and administration.

An API, or Application Programming Interface, allows one software component to “talk” to another directly, according to an explainer from Amazon. For example, the weather app on an iPhone communicates with weather service software to deliver updates to your screen.

“Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” said Kevin McGurn, interim CEO of Trump Media, in a release. The goal of Truth API, the release said, is to deliver posts more quickly to paying customers, to avoid the “cost of a delay in information.”

Experts in business and law say the service makes Trump the first American president to charge money for expedited access to official government business.

“This is a completely new area. It has not been litigated. It is breaking new ground,” said Nejat Seyhun, professor of finance at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

“And so, you have to ask whether the laws apply precisely here, because there’s no precedent.”

Lawsuit says Truth API is unconstitutional. Trump Media disagrees.

A new federal lawsuit alleges Truth API violates some of our nation’s most fundamental laws.

The suit, filed Aug. 12 in U.S. District Court in New York, argues that the paid service breaches the First Amendment guarantee of “equal access to the president’s public announcements,” as well as a Fifth Amendment prohibition against “preferential access to crucial government information” without just cause.

Trump is named as a defendant in the suit, along with Natalie Harp and Daniel Scavino, aides who are said to type his Truth Social posts, among other parties.

Trump Media, which is not a defendant in the suit, responded in a statement to USA TODAY, saying Truth API is no different from services offered by many other online platforms.

“Information from President Trump is disseminated by countless platforms and news outlets, many of which offer subscription APIs,” the statement said. “One of those channels is Truth Social, which was founded as an un-cancellable haven for free speech after the President was deplatformed. Now, left-wing activists are trying to wrongfully weaponize the courts to censor him again and harm our shareholders.”

Many news outlets sell access. Is Truth API different?

Lots of news providers charge money for early or exclusive access to news that can move markets.

The difference with Truth API, its critics say, is that the news in question is official business of our government.

Trump’s Truth Social posts “are presidential records,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, a plaintiff in the lawsuit. “These are records all of the public has a right to, not just those who pay the going rate set by the president’s private companies.”

Preferential access to presidential posts could generate profits for traders of stock and oil futures and a host of other investments, the experts say.

On March 23, a flurry of trades erupted minutes before Trump posted on Truth Social that he was postponing attacks against Iran. The episode sparked allegations of insider trading.

“There are prosecutions against people who get information in advance,” said Xu Jiang, associate professor of business administration at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

“If you let people selectively have access to that information, even if you don’t charge money, the legal basis for that would be very fragile,” he said.

Does Truth API give customers an ‘unfair advantage’?

More than 10 paying customers have subscribed to Truth API, company officials said in an Aug. 10 earnings call.

In that call, someone asked how Trump Media responded to criticism that Truth API gave some traders “an unfair advantage” by selling access.

McGurn replied that the criticism was “misinformed.” He said the new service merely delivers “machine-readable feeds of publicly available Truth posts from the platform’s top accounts in milliseconds.” Paying customers weren’t really getting the posts early, he said – just “fractionally faster” than everyone else.

“Providing licensed real-time public data through commercial APIs is a well-established business practice,” McGurn said in the earnings call.

But not, perhaps, with White House announcements.

“The crux of all of it is, it’s the sale of advance access to presidential information,” said Tillipman of GWU.

Trump “is the one creating the information,” she said. “And now he’s selling access to that information that he’s creating as president through a company that he’s the beneficial owner of.”

And no one, including the creators of Truth API, seems to dispute the monetary value of gaining access to presidential posts “fractionally faster” than the general public.

“You can trade in milliseconds,” said Seyhun of the University of Michigan. “So, if you have a millisecond advantage over everybody else, you can act on it first.”