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President Trump is being sued over a Truth Social service that charges up to $100,000 a month for early access to his posts.
Getting into it: The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation filed the suit Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan, naming Trump, executive assistant Natalie Harp, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, the Executive Office of the President and the White House Office. The complaint calls the arrangement “extraordinary, corrupt, and unconstitutional” and argues it violates the First and Fifth Amendments by handing paying subscribers preferential access to official government announcements. The plaintiffs want the court to declare the setup unlawful and bar the administration from using Truth Social as the exclusive venue for official announcements while selling priority access to it.
The product is Truth API, launched Aug. 1 by Trump Media & Technology Group. It delivers posts from the platform’s 10 most popular accounts in milliseconds, seconds ahead of the general public. Those accounts include Trump, the White House, JD Vance, Kash Patel, Karoline Leavitt, Sean Duffy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Access runs $100,000 a month, or $60,000 if you lock in for three years, and subscribers get an archive going back to 2022 that includes posts later deleted or altered.
The money argument is the heart of it. Trump is Trump Media’s largest shareholder through a revocable trust that controls roughly 41% of the company, a position worth north of $1 billion, and he is its sole beneficiary. The suit says he has posted between 9,000 and 11,000 times since returning to office in January 2025, and that his posts often have no corresponding White House announcement, making them the only channel for that information. Those posts have moved markets before: oil prices dropped after he called off an attack on Iran in April, and individual stocks have jumped when he names a company.
“This scheme is profoundly corrupt,” the complaint says. “The President stands to gain financially by giving ‘market-moving’ government information to those who are willing and able to pay his personal company.”
Despite this, Trump Media isn’t backing off. A spokesman argued that plenty of outlets carry Trump’s words and plenty of them sell API access too, and said the platform was built as a place he couldn’t be thrown off of. “Now, left-wing activists are trying to wrongfully weaponize the courts to censor him again and harm our shareholders,” the statement said, with the spokesman also accusing the Freedom of the Press Foundation of violating the platform’s terms of service.
As of now, there’s been no comment from the White House.
This all comes after Trump’s media company disclosed that it lost $238 million in the second quarter on $1.7 million in revenue, making the API one of the few products it can point to as a real revenue source.
