- United States
- Ohio
- Letter
Ethics Loopholes #5: Trump's Company Sells Traders a Head Start on His Posts
To: Sen. Husted, Rep. Beatty, Sen. Moreno
From: A verified voter in Columbus, OH
October 10
I am writing as your constituent about a dangerous gap in federal ethics law that a corporation largely owned by the President is actively exploiting to monetize executive communications.
On July 16, 2026, Trump Media & Technology Group announced "Truth API," a paid commercial data feed providing early access to posts from key accounts, including the President's, the White House's, and the FBI Director's. Launching August 1 with enterprise subscriptions running $60,000 to $100,000 a month, the company's CEO openly stated that "markets already move on Truth Social posts." The President holds roughly a 41 percent stake in the parent company through a trust, worth over $1 billion.
The primary federal conflict-of-interest statutes do not apply to the President, leaving Congress as the only constitutional body capable of closing this loophole. As detailed in a federal lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York (The Intercept Media v. Trump, No. 26-cv-6867), the President's licensing agreement requires him to post exclusively to Truth Social and wait six hours before publishing the same content elsewhere—while thousands of executive statements have bypassed official White House channels entirely. Whether the informational edge is fractional milliseconds or minutes, licensing commercial access to official presidential announcements turns public governance into a private commodity.
I urge you to take immediate legislative action to:
1. Pass the Stop Corrupt Trading Act (S. 5221 / H.R. 10066): Co-sponsor and advance legislation that bars the President, Vice President, and entities they substantially own from selling advance, non-public access to executive statements.
2. Pass the NO PROFIT Act (S. 5223 / H.R. 10125): Co-sponsor and advance legislation prohibiting commercial platforms from selling prioritized access to government accounts and banning trading on that non-public information.
3. Mandate simultaneous public release: Enforce rules requiring all official executive announcements to appear simultaneously across public .gov channels, barring any agreement that grants commercial platforms a head start on state communications.
No public official should have the authority to auction public information to high-paying Wall Street subscribers. Monetizing the speech of the presidency degrades market integrity, harms public trust, and establishes an intolerable precedent of pay-to-play governance. Reasserting statutory checks on executive communications is an institutional obligation that Congress must fulfill without delay.