Photo: Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

Last month, Donald Trump’s Truth Social started offering a new product to flash traders looking to make a buck: a $100,000-a-month subscription service that would give them early access to the president’s market-moving posts on the social-media platform. Are many of Trump’s posts unintelligible rants, “retruths” from equally unhinged individuals, and bizarre AI memes that, on at least one occasion, have featured him walking through Area 51 beside a “totally nude, surprisingly jacked alien in handcuffs”? Yes. But that doesn’t change the fact that they also sometimes contain news that affects the markets, like the time he wrote, shortly before temporarily pausing tariffs on most countries, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT.” Or when he posted the U.S. would hit Iran “VERY HARD, TONIGHT,” causing crude-oil futures to surge.

Because of this, many people think it’s unfair for a company largely owned by the president to give early access only to those willing and able to to pony up $100,000 a month and that it sounds like insider trading by another name. Among those who think the deal is unfair are San Francisco city attorney David Chui, who filed a lawsuit this week against Truth Social parent company Trump Media & Technology Group to stop the early-access program, saying it is violating California’s Unfair Competition Law by giving rich traders government information that average investors are only privy to after the fact. “They have knowingly created a marketplace for insider trading,” Chiu told the New York Times. “This scheme has turned the public trust into private profit, and it is corruption at the highest level of government.” Noting the White House’s recent bans on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, Chui argued that not only is Truth Social selling information to the few who can afford it, but it’s doing so at a time when Trump is cutting off the flow of information to the public. “The fact that this has been allowed to happen is astonishing,” he said.

In response to the Chui’s suit, a spokesman for Truth Social said Monday, “The people of California should outsource their future lawsuits to AI chatbots who, unlike the left-wing activists masquerading as attorneys who filed this lawsuit, will grasp the basic distinction between public and nonpublic information.”

Chui’s lawsuit follows one filed last month by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Intercept, which argue the “profoundly corrupt” offering violates the First Amendment by making a “profit from selling government information,” and the Fifth Amendment as well, which prohibits charging “unreasonable sums that cannot be justified to offset the cost of the government benefit.” In addition to Truth Social and Trump, the suit names aide Dan Scavino and Natalie “Human Printer” Harp as defendants, who both have access to the president’s account.

Senators Mark Warner and Alex Padilla have also proposed legislation to ban the program, known as Truth API, while Senator Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff have urged the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate the offering or simply ban it. “This appears to be an outrageous abuse of the President’s office for his personal benefit,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to the SEC. Even Republican senator Bill Cassidy has been critical, saying in July that it constitutes “a form of buying access.” Senator Lisa Murkowski called the product “wild.”

During Truth Social’s first-ever earnings call last month, interim CEO Kevin McGurn announced that ten customers had signed up for the subscription service, netting the company as much as $1 million a month. Less happily, he also revealed the company recorded a net loss of $238 million for the second quarter.

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