On July 16, 2026, Trump Media & Technology Group announced a product called Truth API: a licensed, low-latency feed of posts from the ten most market-moving accounts on Truth Social, the president’s own among them. The paid tier went live on August 1. Subscribers pay between $60,000 and $100,000 a month and receive posts milliseconds before they reach the public feed. By mid-August, more than ten institutional customers had signed on, most of them high-frequency trading firms.

The president is the largest shareholder of the company selling the product. The posts being sold include official government announcements.

Every input below cites a public record listed at the end of this page. The score is an opinion, produced by applying the published methodology to those records. The inputs are all listed and open to dispute.

The facts on record

The product. Truth API does not sell secrets. The posts remain publicly available on Truth Social. What subscribers buy is delivery speed: a licensed pipe that reduces the gap between publication and receipt to milliseconds. Trump Media has described the service as a way to monetize a proprietary asset through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream. The company has said it is in talks to extend the product to cloud providers, news organizations, developers of large language models, and eventually retail traders.

The customers. Reports estimate the subscriber count at more than ten firms as of mid-August 2026, predominantly high-frequency trading operations. Their identities have not been disclosed. In a market where execution advantage is measured in microseconds, the value of the product is self-evident to its buyers and was priced accordingly.

The content. The president routinely publishes official government information on Truth Social before or instead of releasing it through conventional government channels. Tariff announcements, including the measures the administration branded “Liberation Day,” and posts on trade restrictions involving China have moved global markets on publication. This is the characteristic that gives the feed its commercial value. A feed of posts that did not move markets would not command $100,000 a month.

The ownership. The president remains Trump Media’s largest shareholder, with a stake reported at roughly 52% of outstanding shares, down from about 57% at the 2024 listing. The holding sits in the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, with Donald Trump Jr. as trustee exercising voting and investment decisions. A revocable trust does not sever the beneficial owner from the asset. Revenue booked by Trump Media accrues to a company the president majority-owns.

The legal objections. Renée Jones, a Boston College law professor and former senior official at the Securities and Exchange Commission, told NPR the arrangement appears to run afoul of Rule 10b5-2 under the Securities Exchange Act, which addresses misuse of material non-public information obtained through a duty of trust or confidence, and of the 2012 STOCK Act. No enforcement action has been brought.

The lawsuit. On August 12, 2026, The Intercept Media Inc. and the Freedom of the Press Foundation filed suit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 26-cv-6867. The defendants are the president, executive assistant Natalie Harp, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, the Executive Office of the President, and the White House Office. Harp and Scavino are named because both are known to post to Truth Social on the president’s behalf. The complaint pleads violations of the First Amendment, on equal access to official information, and the Fifth Amendment. It alleges that the president “stands to gain financially by giving ‘market-moving’ government information to those who are willing and able to pay his personal company.” The suit was filed two days before this ruling and nothing in it has been adjudicated.

The criticism is not one-sided. Objections to the service have come from Republican and Democratic legislators as well as from libertarian and conservative outlets alongside left-leaning ones. This is noted because the Index applies the same formula to officials of every party and records when the objection itself crosses party lines.

The response. A Trump Media spokesman said Truth API is no different from the subscription APIs offered by countless platforms and news outlets that distribute the president’s posts. A company spokesperson has also said that certain politicians falsely accuse the company of anti-free-market behavior while pressuring businesses into boycotting a product. The White House has not stated that any policy announcement was timed with the feed in mind, and the Index does not assert that one was. It scores the documented structure, nothing further.

The ruling, factor by factor

F1 · Benefit Magnitude (7/10, ×3.0). The methodology reserves the ceiling for benefits that are effectively unbounded and names ongoing revenue streams as a type case. What holds it to 7 is the size of the stream on the current record. More than ten subscribers at $60,000 to $100,000 a month is an annualized run rate on the order of $10 million to $14 million. That is recurring money actually collected rather than projected. However, it is one to two orders of magnitude below the $400 million aircraft in Case 001 and the $1.1 billion project in Case 002. On a log scale that is two rungs down from the top. Execution of the stated expansion into cloud providers, model developers, and retail distribution would move this to 9.

F2 · Personal Accrual (9/10, ×2.5). The payments flow into a company in which the president holds a reported 52% beneficial interest. This is in exchange for faster delivery of the officeholder’s own statements, some of which are official acts of his office. The chain from public duty to private receipt is short and documented. This is more direct than Case 002, where the holdings sat with the Trump family rather than the president. It is not a 10 because the interest is mediated by a public company with other shareholders, so he captures roughly half of each dollar rather than all of it. Moreover, the shares sit in a trust with a separate trustee. Direct personal receipt of the subscription fees would score 10.

F3 · Source Conflict (8/10, ×2.0). The buyers are trading firms which have active interests before this government:

• market structure rules
• tax treatment of their gains
• enforcement posture of the SEC and CFTC (agencies whose leadership the president appoints).

Layered on top is a tighter conflict specific to this product. The buyers’ return on the purchase comes from trading ahead of markets on the officeholder’s own policy announcements, which makes the value of what they bought a function of what he decides to announce and when. The score is 8 rather than 9 or 10 because the subscribers are undisclosed and no specific policy request by any named buyer is on the record, unlike the foreign state in Case 001 or the federal credit agencies in Case 002.

F4 · Process Integrity (8/10, ×1.5). Official government information is being routed first through a private, monetized channel owned by the president, with no equal-access mechanism of the kind that governs ordinary federal information release. A former senior SEC official has identified two specific legal regimes the arrangement may violate. A federal lawsuit is pending. Legislators from both parties have objected. Against that, nothing has been adjudicated, the underlying posts do remain free and public, and what is sold is priority rather than exclusivity. That distinction is genuine and is why this scores 8 rather than 10. A court ruling for the plaintiffs, or an SEC enforcement action, would move this to 9 or 10.

F5 · Concealment (3/10, ×1.0). Close to the floor. The service was announced by press release, marketed openly to institutional buyers, reported on for a month before launch, and defended on the record by company spokesmen. Trump Media is an SEC-reporting public company and has presented Truth API to investors as a revenue strategy. The score is 3 rather than 1 for a single reason: the subscriber list is not public. The identities of the firms holding advance access to presidential announcements are the one material fact here that the public cannot check.

The receipt

(7×3.0) + (9×2.5) + (8×2.0) + (8×1.5) + (3×1.0) = 75 Nixons

What would change the score

The methodology commits us to revising rulings as the record develops. This score moves if: the Southern District rules for the plaintiffs or issues an injunction (F4 rises, total moves to roughly 76); the court rules for the defendants (F4 falls to 4 or 5); the SEC or the Department of Justice opens or declines an enforcement action (F4 moves in the corresponding direction); Trump Media discloses its subscriber list (F5 falls to 1); the president divests his stake or the shares move to a genuinely blind trust (F2 falls sharply and this becomes a materially different case); the service expands to the announced additional markets (F1 rises); the product is withdrawn (F1 falls); or documents emerge showing any announcement was timed or routed with the feed’s subscribers in mind, which would raise F3, F4, and F5 together and put this case in a different range entirely. Revisions get their own entries. The math stays public either way.