Lawsuit Claims Trump's Truth Social API Is Selling Government Information to the Highest Bidder
Two nonprofit news organisations have taken President Trump to court over a scheme that lets high-frequency trading firms pay up to $100,000 a month for early access to his Truth Social posts. The plaintiffs, The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, argue that selling priority access to official government announcements is both unconstitutional and straightforwardly corrupt.
Truth Social's commercial API product, branded as Truth API, went live this month. Its first paying customers are mostly algorithmic trading firms that stand to profit from receiving market-moving information milliseconds before anyone else. Trump frequently uses Truth Social as the sole outlet for major government announcements, including military actions, ceasefire declarations, and the hiring and firing of senior officials. Charging for fast access to that information is, the lawsuit argues, privatising the public record for personal gain.
"The President stands to gain financially by giving 'market-moving' government information to those willing and able to pay his personal company," the complaint states. Seth Stern of the Freedom of the Press Foundation was less diplomatic: "A president selling priority access to news he himself generates, for the benefit of a private company he controls, is so blatantly corrupt and unconstitutional that it would have been hard to even fathom just a few years ago."
The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. It names Trump, two White House aides with access to his account, the Executive Office of the President, and the White House Office as defendants. The plaintiffs want the court to declare the arrangement unlawful and issue an injunction stopping the president and his staff from posting official government information exclusively on Truth Social while the paid API remains in place.
The legal challenge invokes both the First and Fifth Amendments. On the First Amendment side, the argument is that equal access to presidential announcements is constitutionally protected, and any restriction on that access must serve a legitimate government interest. Selling preferential access to enrich a privately held company does not qualify. The Fifth Amendment argument targets the charging of fees that bear no relation to any real cost the government is offsetting, and the granting of information advantages for arbitrary commercial reasons.
There is also a web scraping angle. The lawsuit notes that Truth Social plans to crack down on automated tools that pull public posts, and intends to make the paid API the only route to archived content, including deleted and edited posts. Interim CEO Kevin McGurn, speaking on an earnings call after confirming more than ten paying customers, said the company would "create a lot of friction" for anyone not subscribing directly. That is not a subtle statement of intent.
McGurn also said Truth Social is in talks with cloud providers, large news organisations, and AI developers interested in the feed, with retail investors potentially in scope later. The company clearly expects Truth API to be a meaningful revenue stream, which is not nothing given that Trump Media posted just $1.7 million in revenue against a net loss of $238 million in its most recent quarter.
For the plaintiffs, the harm is practical as well as principled. Both organisations report and publish on the president's activities, and both say they now face delayed access to new posts and permanent exclusion from archived ones unless they pay. As The Intercept's editor-in-chief Ben Muessig put it: "Trump is trying to enrich himself by privatising government information that he has no right to sell."
The White House had not responded to requests for comment at the time of writing.