The Inner Monologue

Donald Trump has found an astonishing new way to blur the line between the presidency and his personal financial interests: sell wealthy customers faster access to the president’s words.

Strip away the technology and that’s what this is.

Trump can make decisions that instantly move billions of dollars. Tariffs. Sanctions. Defense contracts. Oil policy. Pharmaceutical policy. Trade agreements.

Then Trump announces those decisions on Truth Social.

Now imagine financial firms paying enormous subscription fees to receive those announcements seconds before everyone else.

Why would they pay?

Obviously, because those seconds are worth money.

A computer can read “50% tariff on imported automobiles,” identify the winners and losers, and begin trading before an ordinary American even sees the post.

Defenders can call this a “premium API” or “low-latency data feed.”

Please.

The product isn’t Trump’s prose. The product is being first.

And the seller isn’t some independent financial-news company racing to report what the government has done.

The president can cause the event being reported.

That’s what makes this stink.

The President of the United States exercises government power.

That creates valuable information.

A company in which the president has a huge financial interest distributes his announcement.

Wealthy customers pay that company for an informational head start.

And traders can potentially turn that head start into money.

That looks remarkably like monetizing the presidency.

An anti-redistribution agreement wouldn’t make it better. It would protect the product. Subscribers could use the information but couldn’t immediately give it away to everyone else.

In other words, the exclusivity is the thing being sold.

And spare me the argument that it’s “only a few seconds.”

If those seconds aren’t valuable, nobody will pay tens of thousands of dollars for them.

If sophisticated trading firms will pay that much, don’t insult us by pretending the advantage is meaningless.

Try the simplest political test imaginable.

Imagine Barack Obama owned a company called Obama Media while president. Then imagine Wall Street firms paying Obama Media huge subscription fees to receive Obama’s market-moving presidential announcements before ordinary Americans.

Republicans would have screamed corruption.

And they would have been right.

Whether prosecutors could successfully fit this arrangement into an insider-trading, securities-fraud or government-ethics statute is an important legal question.

But legality is not the same thing as integrity.

The presidency is not supposed to be a proprietary information service.

Government decisions aren’t supposed to become premium content.

And Americans shouldn’t have to purchase the Presidential Platinum Package to receive official information at the same time as Wall Street.

The solution is embarrassingly simple:

Official presidential announcements should go to everyone simultaneously.

No premium tier.

No five-second advantage.

No $100,000 subscription.

No privately monetized head start.

When government power creates the information, the public should receive it at the same time.

Because when the president’s private company can charge wealthy traders for faster access to the president’s market-moving announcements, we shouldn’t need a team of securities lawyers to tell us something is rotten.

It looks like corruption.

It smells like corruption.

It tastes like corruption.

Maybe somebody will eventually convince a court that it isn’t technically corruption.

But they’re going to have a hell of a time convincing the rest of us.