Donald Trump’s latest business venture – selling advance access to his market-moving Truth Social posts – further intertwines his presidential role with his private financial interests, allowing paying customers to receive information that could influence markets before it is made public.
It has been said that Donald J Trump wants to be one of the “great men of history”. What the philosopher Hegel meant by that term, according to Wikipedia, was “highly influential and unique individuals who, due to their natural abilities, such as superior intellect, heroic courage, extraordinary leadership abilities or divine inspiration, have a decisive historical effect.”
Trump may get his wish. Millennia from now, he could be as famous as the Roman emperors Nero and Caligula.
Trump is far and away the most corrupt head of government in American history. In the last year, says Reuters, he made $2.3 billion on his and his son’s crypto enterprises alone. Much of this was earned by issuing tokens – i.e. a meme coin, $TRUMP, created out of thin air – which inflated in value, then fell, costing investors that same $2.3 billion that the Trump enterprise gained.
Then there is the effective sale of presidential pardons and corporate favours. While the Trump administration denies a connection, the pardons and corporate favours took place in too-close proximity to the bribes that preceded them to be coincidence.
Suppose you were the CEO of a public corporation, and you offered to sell information about the company to paying Wall Street subscribers before it is announced to the public. If you did that, you would be swiftly indicted, prosecuted, and sent to prison for a white-collar crime.
But that is precisely what Trump and his entourage are doing. Trump often makes announcements on his Truth Social platform, which he initiated when he was kicked off Twitter after the 6 January 2021 insurrection in which Trump supporters, egged on by Trump himself, overran the US Capitol in an effort to overturn the election of president Biden.
When Trump makes an announcement on Truth Social it often abruptly moves markets. For example, if Trump announces that a deal with Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz is imminent, the price of oil plummets.
Now Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), which is majority owned by the Trump family, has offered to share Truth Social posts with paying customers before they are announced to the public. The price charged is $100,000 a month.
Knowledge of a market-moving Trump quote by a major investor before it is known to the public, even if it’s only seconds before, could earn the investor many millions of dollars.
Trump seems not to care about the negative impression this gives. In fact, he seems not to care about anything except his own self-aggrandisement and enrichment. He doesn’t even care about the success of his own party, the Republican Party, whose prospects for the November midterm election are bleak because of the inflationary effect of Trump’s tariffs and the Iran war.
Trump learned early on that the most important thing is to amass attention. And it doesn’t even matter if the attention is approving or disapproving. Attention brings name recognition; more attention reinforces it.
Prominent potential buyers of the advance information that TMTG is selling, such as JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and the hedge fund Citadel, are not saying whether they’re buying. Although they may feel they have to buy because otherwise competitors who do buy will get the better of them, they are concerned that a subsequent administration will prosecute them for insider trading – which is what they would be doing. But some high-frequency trading firms have bought in.
This practice of the Trump organisation raises the danger of a positive feedback loop, driving things further and further into the gutter, especially in view of Trump’s laser focus on self-aggrandisement and enrichment. To maximise TMTG revenue, he could start making yet more and more market-moving announcements on Truth Social. He already announces things that aren’t true but still move markets, such as that negotiations with Iran are coming to a successful conclusion. But with the incentive of driving more revenue towards TMTG he could double down on that. The potential for geopolitical havoc, if there isn’t already havoc enough, is enormous.
The United States is blessed with a functioning network of courts, which have so far held Trump’s worst attempts to work his will at bay. The Republican Congress will not do it, for reasons that are somewhat obscure but, terrifyingly, include their actual physical fear of the Trump base who send them seriously threatening messages.
The United States has bounced back from threats to its integrity before. In 1954 it stopped Senator Joseph McCarthy’s national campaign of intimidation on the pretext of a dire communist threat. It replaced president George W Bush, who had become infamous for overreacting to the 11 September 2001 Al Qaeda attack by invading Iraq and backing torture, with president Obama. Let us hope it can bounce back this time. But it will be more difficult. Its decline may now be irreversible. Great man of history, indeed.
Michael Edesess is an accomplished mathematician and economist with a PhD in pure mathematics in stochastic processes and expertise in the finance, energy, and sustainable development fields. Michael is an adjunct professor at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in the division of environment and sustainability.