The Treasury of Words

CNBC reports that Trump Media and Technology Group launched a paid data service on August 1st, selling clients faster access to posts from President Donald Trump on Truth Social. The product is straightforward as a business proposition: those who pay receive the signal before those who do not. In the markets I helped build, speed of information has always conferred advantage. I have no quarrel with commerce. I have a great many quarrels with this particular arrangement.

The problem is not the technology. The problem is the conflict.

A sitting president retains a financial interest in a company that now sells access — prioritized access — to that president's own public communications. Consider what this means in practice. A hedge fund, a foreign sovereign wealth manager, an industrial conglomerate: any of them may purchase an edge on what the president of the United States is about to say. Markets move on presidential speech. They always have. But when the vehicle that captures that movement is controlled by the president himself, we have collapsed the wall between the public trust and private gain in a manner I find dangerous to the republic's credit.

I argued in the Report on Public Credit that the faith of the nation depends on the perception that government acts for the common interest, not for the enrichment of those who hold its reins. That principle does not confine itself to bond markets. It extends to every instrument by which government touches commerce — and a president's words touch commerce every hour of every day. When those words become a subscription product, the public's confidence in the neutrality of those words is rightly diminished. Inference, not recollection: I cannot know the precise mechanics of how this data feed operates or how markets have responded; that is a matter for reporters and regulators to establish. But the structural incentive it creates is plain enough without a technical diagram.

An energetic executive is a necessity. A self-enriching one is a corruption.

I spent my career defending executive vigor against those who would make the presidency a ceremonial post. I have no patience for the argument that a strong president is by nature a dangerous one. But vigor must be bounded — bounded by law, by transparency, and by the ancient republican principle that the officeholder serves the people, not his own ledger. The arrangement described by CNBC tests that boundary in a new and particularly modern form. It is not a bribe; it may not be illegal. But it is the architecture of a conflict, and republics that tolerate the architecture long enough eventually inhabit the building.

What should be done?

The remedy is not complex in concept, whatever it may be in execution. The president should divest, fully and verifiably, from any entity that monetizes his official conduct. Congress should legislate — clearly and with teeth — that no instrumentality owned or controlled by a sitting president may charge for prioritized access to that president's public statements. The relevant committees of the House and Senate ought to demand disclosure of who has purchased the service and what positions those purchasers held in markets sensitive to presidential speech. Sunlight, as I have always held, is the cheapest and most effective regulator we possess. Apply it here, without delay.