By admin 
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Read more Trump’s Irrationality Is Dangerous
For Donald Trump, social media is a fundamental component of the presidency. He shares his thoughts freely and constantly; world-shaking announcements that other presidents might have reserved for prime-time speeches, he posts online.
Trump Media and Technology Group, the company that controls Truth Social and is majority-owned by the president, is now selling speedy access to those posts through a service called Truth API. Launched this weekend, it provides users a raw feed of “market-moving” posts from the “highest-ranking Truth Social accounts”—the top one being Trump’s, which has 13 million followers. Typically, social-media users encounter split-second lag times before being notified about new posts; Truth API purports to minimize delays. It’s aimed at investment firms that can afford the subscription price (Trump Media has not publicized the cost, but The Wall Street Journal and others have reported that it’s up to $100,000 a month), and promises traders an advantage over their competitors. It also gives Trump Media a way to capitalize directly on the president’s words—and gives Trump another way to capitalize on the nation’s highest office.
The initial press release for Truth API made no mention of the president’s posts. But Truth Social was created primarily as a vehicle for Trump’s own commentary after he was booted off Twitter in 2021 following the January 6 riot. New accounts on the website automatically follow Trump, as well as Donald Trump Jr. and many others. (Trump Media declined to answer my questions, and the White House denied that Truth API creates conflicts of interest for the president.)
The value of the new service hinges on the fact that Trump’s statements move markets. This president has a habit of sharing new policies on social media before the White House has had a chance to release an official statement. He has used Truth Social to make adjustments to tariff rules, announce military actions, and telegraph future plans for foreign interventions. (Many observers have also pointed out that he tends to wait until after trading hours to share news that might have an undesirable effect on markets, as has been the case throughout the Iran war.)
The president’s comments portend stock-market shifts in lower-stakes situations too. One recent example: Trump told the public to “go out and buy” a Dell computer at least four times this year. He began doing this on February 19, about a week after he purchased at least $1 million worth of Dell stock. The last time Trump dropped this line, at the White House in July, the share price immediately climbed by almost 8 percent. Maybe the president just really likes Dell computers—or maybe he really likes the company’s CEO, Michael Dell, who, along with his wife, pledged to donate more than $6 billion to the administration’s new child-savings-account program. The president encouraged people to buy in, and shareholders made money.
Trump Media has said that Truth API data will be delivered in “milliseconds,” providing what they say is the “fastest access” to these posts. Critics argue that this gives certain traders an unfair, or even illegal, leg up: Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff wrote a to the Securities and Exchange Commission last week demanding an investigation into the service. The letter suggests that, because the service offers access to market-moving posts before most people have had a chance to see it, it could potentially violate insider-trading laws, which ban trades based on nonpublic information.
But most of the experts I spoke with questioned this logic. Existing securities laws don’t fit this situation perfectly. Trump Media told The Wall Street Journal that Truth Social posts will continue to be publicly viewable at the same time for all users, whether they pay for Truth API or not. Those who subscribe will be notified slightly before the rest of us, but the posts themselves won’t be delayed or hidden—which could make it hard to argue that the information contained within them isn’t actually public. And Trump Media didn’t invent the concept of high-speed data feeds for institutional traders. As Stephen Bainbridge, a professor at UCLA Law, has pointed out, today’s stock exchanges already sell similar products, which are broadly considered legal.
Read more Now, Thanks to AI, You Never Have to Speak to Your Kids Again
Some of the legal scholars I interviewed observed that because this situation is unprecedented, the law may simply not have caught up. The SEC could potentially play a role in investigating Trump Media, but the agency, now under the aegis of Trump’s handpicked chair, Paul Atkins, has not commented on Warren and Schiff’s letter. (A spokesperson for the SEC declined to comment for this story.) When I asked Jonathan Macey, a professor at Yale Law, what he thought of Warren and Schiff’s letter, he told me that they were essentially asking the fox to come check on the henhouse.
Truth API is a clear attempt to create a new revenue stream for a struggling company—its CEO, former Representative Devin Nunes, stepped down earlier this year after overseeing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses during his tenure. It’s also yet another way for Trump to make money from the office of the presidency. Trump reported that he earned more than $2.2 billion last year, much of which came from cryptocurrency tokens and investments. No other president has ever come close to generating this much personal wealth while in office. Now he stands to profit from something more straightforward: unmediated access to his own thoughts.
Related:
- David Frum: The Trump presidency’s world-historical heist
- The real Trump family business is crypto.
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- Tom Nichols: Trump’s irrationality is dangerous.
- A family tragedy in the age of Trump
- What if Freud was right?
Today’s News
- The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general. The nomination now heads to a vote in the full Senate.
- President Trump met with U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro at the White House after publicly criticizing her for dropping vandalism charges related to damage at the Reflecting Pool. Pirro was not fired and did not resign following the meeting, according to people familiar with the matter.
- Representative Max Miller’s attorney apologized after the Ohio Republican publicly shared unredacted court documents that included a “sensitive” image of his young daughter, saying that the photo was inadvertently released. Miller is facing domestic-abuse allegations, which he has denied, from his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, who is also the daughter of Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio.
Evening Read
The Catholic Church’s New Schism
By Luis Parrales
At an open-air Mass in Écône, Switzerland, before a crowd of about 16,000 people, four priests became bishops last month. The men professed their fidelity to tradition against “heretics, schismatics, and those who rebel against our Holy Father.” They did so knowing full well that, in becoming bishops, they lacked something the Catholic Church deems essential: permission from the pope.
Read the full article.
More From The Atlantic
- The danger of Trump’s anti-communist rhetoric
- One problem with attacking the Smithsonian? Americans like it.
- Get used to high gas prices.
- Juliette Kayyem: Trump blames America First.
- Alexandra Petri: Now, thanks to Sam Altman, you never have to speak with your kids again.
- When following the rules leads to disaster
Culture Break
Debate. Stop calling siblings “gifts,” Amanda Ruggeri urges. The term assumes that adding a child to a family is for the best. But that’s not always the case.
Explore. In Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey (out now in theaters), viewers see inside the Trojan horse, but they “do not see inside the characters or their world,” Emily Wilson argues.
Play our daily crossword.
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
Read more Stop Calling Siblings ‘Gifts’