Two media organizations sued President Trump on Wednesday over his social media platform Truth Social's new service offering faster access to his often market-moving posts, calling it "extraordinary, corrupt, and unconstitutional."
The Intercept and the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation alleged that the Truth Social offering runs afoul of the First Amendment's guarantee of equal public access to the president's statements and also violates the Fifth Amendment by granting preferential access for "unreasonable sums." The suit asks a federal court in New York to block the president from posting official government information exclusively on Truth Social.
The service, called Truth API, charges up to $100,000 a month for faster access to Truth Social posts from the president and other high-profile users of the platform. In the world of high-frequency Wall Street trading, even a few milliseconds edge could mean a difference of millions of dollars.
It drew immediate blowback from critics of the president, who say Trump has mixed his private businesses with government affairs. The lawyers who filed the lawsuit on Wednesday underscored that argument.
"The president here is using the power of the office to vastly enrich himself, and I think it's unprecedented in American history," Brendan Ballou, who runs the Public Integrity Project and is representing the media groups in the suit, said in an interview. "In some ways, Trump is the Picasso of corruption. He comes up with schemes that just wouldn't occur to you or I, and the Truth Social one is an example of that."
In addition to Trump, the suit also names as defendants the president's executive assistant Natalie Harp and White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, two aides who have access to Trump's Truth Social account, according to the suit. The Executive Office of the President and the White House Office are also defendants.
A spokesperson for the Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, said monetizing social media platform data is commonplace among tech companies and that the president's social media posts are spread across the internet by many platforms and news outlets.
The president founded the social media service as "an uncancellable haven for free speech," the Trump Media statement said.
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
The controversial service is being promoted at a time of acute financial distress for the president's media company.
On Monday, Trump Media reported a $238 million loss for the second quarter tied mostly to cryptocurrency assets. Given the mounting red ink, executives told investors on a conference call that they are making "the disciplined choice" to focus energy on Truth Social.
To that end, the company reported that more than 10 customers have signed up for the faster-access feed. Trump Media officials said they were "primarily high-frequency trading firms" but did not name them.
Congressional Democrats, legal experts and even some Wall Street executives told NPR that selling a premium product giving paid customers quicker access to the president's announcements about economic policy, the war in Iran and other topics raises market integrity questions and could potentially violate laws against insider trading.
The lawyers who filed the suit say the service also puts journalists covering the White House who do not pay for the president's posts at a disadvantage.
"It will be harder for them to do their job if they don't have the fastest access to this information," said Ballou of the Public Integrity Project. "It's just as much about the accuracy of information as it is the speed."
Financial disclosures released in June show that the president took in at least $2 billion last year.
While Trump's media company is hemorrhaging money, critics say the Truth Social subscription service is just the latest instance of Trump turning the office of the president into an opportunity for profits.
The president is the largest shareholder of his media company, which his son, Donald Trump Jr., oversees. Trump Media's ambitions are far-reaching and, at times, have boggled analysts, like when it announced a merger with a nuclear fusion company.
In the company's earnings call on Monday, executives said that merger was still pending. Company officials also said they are abandoning a plan to launch Truth Predict, the president's proposed entry into the booming prediction market sector. Instead, executives told investors, Truth Social will promote Crypto.com's prediction market services to the social media platform's users.
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