The Fifty-Millisecond Presidency

Trump Media charges up to a hundred thousand dollars a month for a head start on Donald Trump’s posts. Three lawsuits ask whether the word of the state can be a private asset.

At 10:05 P.M. on August 1st, according to the time stamp on the post, the account @realDonaldTrump announced that the United States was “locked and loaded” against Iran, at a level of force not seen since the Second World War, and that, at the request of Tehran and its neighbors, the President was calling the attack off, in exchange for a promise to open the Strait of Hormuz. It was a Saturday night, and the oil markets were closed; when they reopened, Brent and West Texas Intermediate crude fell about five per cent. It was also the day Truth API went live.

Kevin McGurn, the interim C.E.O. of Trump Media & Technology Group, has described what the product gives its subscribers as a fifty-millisecond advantage, delivered straight into an algorithmic trading platform. If that is what happened on August 1st, the head start fell on a night when no algorithm could use it, which is precisely the point: the next such post may come on a Tuesday afternoon. Fifty milliseconds is nothing to a human being; the eye cannot blink that fast. To an algorithm, it is an era. In fifty milliseconds, a signal travels some six thousand miles down a fibre-optic cable, and a trading system can place and cancel thousands of orders on oil futures, Treasuries, and equities before anyone has read the first sentence.

On September 21st, David Chiu, the City Attorney of San Francisco, sued Trump Media on behalf of the people of California. Four days earlier, in Washington, the watchdog groups American Oversight and Campaign for Accountability had filed a federal suit of their own; and six weeks earlier, The Intercept, the investigative-news nonprofit, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation had gone to federal court in Manhattan over the same product, naming as defendants not the company but the President and two of his aides. The subject of all three suits is Truth API, a paid data feed that, for sixty to a hundred thousand dollars a month, delivers posts from the ten most important accounts on Truth Social, Donald Trump’s among them, a few dozen milliseconds before the rest of the world sees them. A hearing on a preliminary injunction in the New York case is set for October 7th.

Chiu put the matter in a sentence: no ordinary person can pay that fee. Trump Media replied that the people who filed the suit fail to grasp the basic distinction between public and nonpublic information. The whole dispute lives inside that reply.

Markets have been paying for time for four hundred years, and nobody has ever prospered in them by deciding that a second has no price. The novelty is not the sale of speed. The novelty is that the merchandise is the word of a head of state; that the vendor is a company in which that head of state owns forty-one per cent; and that between the two there stands no institution at all. It is worth taking apart without cheap satisfaction, because the case says more about the state in the age of algorithms than it does about one President.

The Product

Trump Media announced Truth API on July 16th, as a licensed, machine-readable stream of posts from the platform’s ten most followed accounts. The company has not published the full list, but press reports put on it, besides the President, Vice-President J. D. Vance; Dan Scavino, the White House deputy chief of staff; Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary; Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation; Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I.; and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The price is a hundred thousand dollars a month, or sixty thousand on a three-year contract. In late August, McGurn spoke of customers “in the mid-teens”, mostly high-frequency trading firms, and of a contract with one of the largest distributors of financial data, which he declined to name. Next in line, he said, were data-center operators, developers of large language models, and prediction-market platforms, the same event contracts that are the subject of a separate regulatory fight in the United States. At the same time, the company promised “friction” for anyone who had been pulling posts from the platform with tools of their own.

The sales material does not pretend to subtlety. A pitch deck lists ten “market-moving” posts, and the tagline holds that when @realDonaldTrump posts, the world reacts, and that no comparable signal exists. In a press release, the C.E.O. spoke of monetizing proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream. For a company that booked a net loss of two hundred and thirty-eight million dollars in the second quarter of 2026, this may be the first product whose price bears some relation to its value. One macro-hedge-fund executive told reporters that the arrangement was scandalous, but that the President’s posts move markets, so everyone would have to pay. There is no more transparent form of access than a price list.

Who profits is a matter of record. About forty-one per cent of Trump Media’s shares are held by a revocable trust whose sole beneficiary is the President and whose trustee is his son. Securities filings also show that since 2021, and in restated form since February of 2024, Trump has been bound to the company by a licensing agreement with a “six-hour exclusive”: every post is to go to Truth Social first, and elsewhere only six hours later. The agreement carves out governmental and political content, an exception that the President, according to the New York complaint, scarcely uses: from January through early August of 2026, the complaint counts more than four thousand posts on Truth Social, a hundred and sixty on Facebook, eighteen on X. Whether that is contract or preference is a question the securities filing does not answer; the effect is the same. In February, the White House press secretary confirmed that the President’s posts should be taken as the policy of the Administration.

Three Lawsuits, Two Roads

The suits differ in construction, which is the most interesting thing about them, legally. San Francisco is suing the company, not the President, under California’s Unfair Competition Law, which forbids business practices that are “unlawful” or “unfair.” The unlawfulness is said to flow from two sources of federal law. The first is aiding and abetting the President’s violation of Section 9(a) of the STOCK Act of 2012, which forbids members of the executive branch, the President included, from using nonpublic information obtained through their office as a means of making a private profit. The second is the insider-trading laws, Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 beneath it, which the STOCK Act extended to officials by declaring that they owe the government and its citizens a duty of trust and confidence with respect to such information. The unfairness is said to consist in the fact that the harm to ordinary investors, 401(k) holders included, outweighs whatever utility the product has. The city asks for an injunction and civil penalties of up to twenty-five hundred dollars per violation.

The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation take the constitutional road. They sue the President in his official capacity, along with two aides, Natalie Harp and Dan Scavino, the only people besides him with access to the account, and the White House offices that employ them. The claims: the First Amendment (a right to receive the public statements of public officials on equal terms, and a right of access to the public forum that an official’s posts constitute), the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions, and the Fifth Amendment (equal protection, and an unjustified fee for access to a public good). The remedy sought: a ban on publishing official announcements exclusively on a platform that sells priority to them. For the Freedom of the Press Foundation, whose database of the President’s attacks on the press is built by scraping Truth Social, the promised “friction” is not an inconvenience but a threat to the archive itself, to the deleted and edited posts that only a scraper preserves. The Washington suit, filed on September 17th by American Oversight and Campaign for Accountability, follows the New York road and adds the Paperwork Reduction Act to the First and Fifth Amendments.

The division of labor is not accidental. Since Mississippi v. Johnson, in 1867, American courts have declined to enjoin the President in the performance of his official duties, so the New York suit aims at the two assistants who hold the password; in the tradition of Youngstown, the injunction runs to the underling, not the boss. San Francisco, for its part, sidesteps the immunities that surround the President (Nixon v. Fitzgerald shields him from damages for official acts, Mississippi v. Johnson from injunctions) by suing the company, but it pays a price: to make its unlawfulness claims stick, it must show that the President has broken the law in a proceeding to which the President is not a party. A judge will be asked to find, with the President absent and as a threshold matter, that the head of state is violating an ethics statute. It is a delicate construction, and it is why the city’s “unfair” claim, which needs no such finding, may end up carrying the case.

Both suits also deserve to be read through the interests of their authors. Chiu has, by one count, filed nineteen lawsuits against the Administration since January of 2025; at the city’s side are the firm of Matthew Platkin, the former Attorney General of New Jersey, and the Democracy Defenders Fund of Norman Eisen, a lawyer from the first impeachment. On the New York side are Yale Law School’s media-freedom clinic and the watchdog group CREW. A Trump Media spokesperson called the plaintiffs left-wing activists masquerading as attorneys. As a description of the sociology of the dispute, it is not entirely off; as a legal argument, it means nothing. The picture is complicated by the Republican senators Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Thom Tillis, who criticized the service publicly, and by fifty-three former federal prosecutors and agents from eleven Administrations who, on September 21st, filed an amicus brief in the New York case arguing that the company is likely committing federal crimes. By September 25th, the Electronic Frontier Foundation had filed an amicus brief of its own.

The Best Argument Trump Media Has

An honest analysis begins with the adversary’s strongest argument, and this one is strong indeed. The President’s post is a publication. The instant the button is pressed, the information is public, and Truth API sells nothing more than faster delivery of what already belongs to everyone. Bloomberg, Reuters, and the exchanges themselves have lived this way for decades: a Bloomberg terminal costs tens of thousands of dollars a year, exchanges sell faster quote feeds, and high-frequency traders string microwave links between Chicago and New Jersey to beat the fibre by a few milliseconds. McGurn told CNBC that the demand came from the market, that the technology is standard across the industry, and that fifty milliseconds is simply the topology of the Internet: a post goes to Truth Social, then to X, Reddit, and TikTok, and someone is always first. No one has ever placed Presidential statements under the kind of “lockup” that governs reporters handling Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Presidents have always chosen who hears first: the White House press pool, the background briefing by a “senior Administration official,” the leak to a friendly newsroom. The old system was a hierarchy of access paid for in loyalty. The new one is a price list, and a price list has at least the virtue of being legible. It must also be said, in fairness, that the gravest suspicions of insider trading in this story concern not the fifty milliseconds after a post but the quarter hour before one: in March of 2026, in the fifteen minutes before the President posted about talks with Iran, some five hundred and eighty million dollars’ worth of oil futures changed hands, and nobody has established by whom or on what knowledge. Truth API did not create that. It was there already.

Then come the purely legal arguments. The STOCK Act forbids using nonpublic information as a means of private profit, and the President trades in nothing; he speaks. The profit accrues to a company that sells delivery. The First Amendment protects the publisher, too: no one can dictate to whom, and when, it delivers its content. The state-action doctrine requires that it be the state, and not a private firm, that burdens a freedom, and Trump Media is a private company. There is an irony here that courts will remember: in 2022, Trump himself lost a suit against Twitter because a federal judge in San Francisco held that the platform was not a state actor. Finally, a California consumer statute is being asked to regulate a Florida company’s contracts with funds in Chicago and New York, which raises questions of jurisdiction and reach; the company will almost certainly try to move the case to federal court.

And here is where the argument cracks. Insider-trading law has never required the tipper to trade: since Dirks v. S.E.C., in 1983, one who passes inside information to others in exchange for a personal benefit answers for their trades, and forty-one per cent of the vendor is a personal benefit of some size. The state-action defense, too, has a soft spot. The plaintiffs in New York do not claim that Truth Social is the government; they sue the officials for choosing, with knowledge of the fee, a channel that sells priority to the state’s word, which is a different question from the one Trump lost against Twitter. Reuters, defending in 2013 its sale of a consumer-sentiment index two seconds ahead of its other clients, stressed that the data were non-governmental. That defense presupposes that governmental data are different. As for the topology of the network, the exchanges have already litigated that question, with results that cut both ways. In 2012, the New York Stock Exchange explained that its premium customers had received quotes early because of system architecture, not by decision; the S.E.C. treated it as a violation and imposed the first fine in its history on an exchange. Four years later, in Lanier v. BATS, the Second Circuit held that an exchange’s duty ends with sending its data to the public feed and to the paid feeds at the same instant; what the cables do afterward is nobody’s liability. So the case against Truth API turns on a fact no outsider has seen: whether the post is pushed to subscribers before it is rendered to the public, or merely arrives faster after a simultaneous release. The company’s own marketing, which sells “the fastest access” and promises friction for anyone taking the public route, reads more like the former. And in Texas Gulf Sulphur, in 1968, a federal appeals court held that information is not public at the moment it is uttered but only once it has had time to reach the market; an executive who phoned his broker minutes after a press conference was trading on inside information. The publicness of information is not the moment someone speaks it but the moment others could have heard it. American law, it is true, has never adopted a rule of equal information; Chiarella, in 1980, buried that idea, and what the law polices is the breach of a duty. Which is why the complaints reach for the STOCK Act: it supplies the duty that the general law lacks, by declaring, in so many words, that the President owes one to the citizens with respect to what his office tells him. The distinction between speaking and being heard is nearly sixty years old. The duty is fourteen.

An Old Art, and a Law That Is Always Late

There is nothing new in the trade in time. In the sixteenth century, the Fuggers, the Augsburg banking dynasty, kept a network of correspondents whose letters about prices, wars, and the deaths of princes circulated through Europe long before newspapers did. The legend of Nathan Rothschild, who supposedly knew the result of Waterloo a day before London did, is mostly invention, but it has endured for two centuries because it describes a true structure: whoever knows first, wins. Paul Julius Reuter began, in 1850, with carrier pigeons between Aachen and Brussels, filling a gap in the telegraph line.

Closest to today’s dispute, though, are the Blanc brothers of Bordeaux. Between 1834 and 1836, François and Joseph Blanc, who speculated in government bonds, bribed an operator of the state’s optical telegraph at Tours to insert agreed-upon “errors” into routine government dispatches, errors immediately cancelled by a correction sign. The error vanished from the official text, but an accomplice with a spyglass outside Bordeaux read it off the arms of the semaphore: the market in Paris had gone up, or down. For two years, the Blancs knew days before the Bordeaux exchange, to which news travelled by stagecoach. They were caught because an ailing operator confided in a colleague. In court, almost nothing happened to them: no law fitted what they had done, so they answered, if at all, for bribing an official, and kept their profits. In 1837, Louis-Philippe signed a law establishing a state monopoly on telegraphy. The law does not recognize a new technology until someone has made enough money from it to wake the law up.

Every era since has replayed the cycle. In 1987, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of R. Foster Winans, a Wall Street Journal reporter who sold brokers the contents of his column before it went to print (Carpenter v. United States); what had been misappropriated was the newspaper’s information before publication, its contents and its timing, which belonged to the newspaper. In 2000, the S.E.C. adopted Regulation Fair Disclosure, forbidding companies to lift the veil selectively for analysts. In 2012, the New York Stock Exchange paid five million dollars because its paid data feeds had outrun the public one; the S.E.C.’s enforcement chief said at the time that an advantage measured in milliseconds is now real, and that it hurts retail investors. In 2013, Thomson Reuters, under pressure from the New York Attorney General, suspended the sale of the University of Michigan’s sentiment index two seconds early to clients paying more than six thousand dollars a month; the five-minute head start for its ordinary clients survived, and that is the instructive part, because the index was private property and the state had no claim on it. In January of 2026, the President posted employment figures on Truth Social twelve hours before the Bureau of Labor Statistics released them, and a lockup regime built over decades was breached from the top. The pattern is not a rule of law; American law has no general rule that everyone must know at once. It is a tendency of institutions: whenever the timing of public information has come before a public authority, the authority has treated that timing as something not to be sliced and sold, the more so the more public the source.

The principle has roots deeper than securities law. Since 1665, the London Gazette has printed the acts of the Crown “by authority,” the same for every reader. The Federal Register was created in 1935 after an embarrassment in which the federal government was enforcing a regulation it had itself revoked, and no one in Washington could find that out. Lon Fuller wrote promulgation into the inner morality of law; Poland’s constitution makes publication in the Journal of Laws, the official gazette, the condition of a statute’s taking effect. The modern state rests on the assumption that promulgation is a public act, single and equal. Truth API is the Federal Register with a premium tier: not in law, where a post is not a rule, but in function, since the post is where the act of state is first announced.

What the Courts Might Do

The honest answer is that no one knows, but the obstacles are plain. In the New York case, the crux is state action. In Lindke v. Freed, in 2024, the Supreme Court adopted a two-part test for officials’ social media: actual authority to speak on behalf of the state, and a purported exercise of that authority in the posts at issue. The President’s posts pass it easily, especially after the press secretary’s declaration. But what is being challenged is not the post; it is the fee for priority, and the company collects the fee. The government will argue that the President merely speaks and Trump Media merely sells, and that fusing the two into “joint action” is the plaintiffs’ construction. Then there is Houchins v. KQED, from 1978, a fractured decision, a plurality with a concurrence, but one that has held, in which the Court declined to recognize a general constitutional right of access to government information; the line of cases on equal access for the press concerned credentials and admission, not milliseconds. My estimate, for what a forecast is worth before the hearing: under the four-part test for preliminary relief (likelihood of success, irreparable harm, the balance of equities, the public interest), a broad injunction is unlikely, a narrow order against the two aides possible, and an appeal all but certain whichever way it goes.

In the California case, the sturdiest claim is unfairness, because the balancing test the city invokes, which weighs harm against utility, gives courts wide room; California’s courts have never settled whether that test, a stricter one tethered to legislative policy, or the Federal Trade Commission’s three-part standard governs, and the choice may decide the case. The unlawfulness claims are fragile for the reasons above: they require a finding, with the President absent, of a violation by him, and a finding that a few dozen milliseconds render information nonpublic. Texas Gulf Sulphur and the S.E.C.’s 2012 order argue for the latter; years of tolerated paid data feeds, and Lanier, argue against it. What is probable is years of fighting over which court should hear the case before anyone touches the merits.

The resolution may come outside a courtroom. Senators Alex Padilla and Mark Warner have called on Congress for a statutory ban, an uncertain road in the present balance of power. The S.E.C., as of this writing, has announced no proceeding, which does not exclude an inquiry that no one has announced. What remains is the exchanges’ model: release to the paid feed no earlier than to the public one, and let the cables do what cables do. Trump Media could declare victory, since it has said from the start that the information is public, and keep the revenue from licensing, archives, and reliable delivery, which have a market of their own. Except that the price of Truth API is built on the head start, not on convenience; “no comparable signal exists” is not a slogan for a parser. Without the fifty milliseconds, a product priced at a hundred thousand dollars a month becomes a data-licensing business of the ordinary kind, priced like one. The dispute, at bottom, is over whether the value of those milliseconds can be the property of the head of state’s company.

Why It Is Unprecedented

What is unprecedented is not the sale of speed, which half of Wall Street sells. It is four features at once. The merchandise is the act of state itself: a ceasefire, a tariff, an appointment, a decision to strike, not a company’s quarterly results. The vendor is the company of the official who performs the act. The beneficiary is that same official, through a trust. And the channel is first by contract and by practice: the licensing agreement makes Truth Social the default first outlet for everything the President posts, and although it exempts governmental and political content, the President does not use the exemption. Nobody had to think of an A.P.I. for the state’s word to be routed through a private asset; the routing came first. The Blancs had to bribe an operator; Debray had to have a mistress; Borowiecki had to be in Lucy Zucker’s bedroom. Here bribery, affair, and bedroom are superfluous, because the source of the information and its seller have signed a licensing agreement and disclosed it in securities filings. If this is corruption, it may be the first to arrive dressed in the forms of corporate law: a licence, a disclosure, a price list.

A European reader may reflexively think that none of this could happen at home, and will be half right. The European Union’s Market Abuse Regulation forbids anyone, not only issuers, to deal or to tip on inside information, so a trader who paid for a head start on a Prime Minister’s posts could be reached, if the head start were inside information, which is the same question the Americans are litigating. Poland’s Penal Code counts the President among public officials, and its Article 231 punishes an official who abuses his powers to the detriment of the public interest; a Polish President who did this would answer, in theory, before the Tribunal of State. In theory, because that tribunal has convicted almost no one in its history, and because the provision was written for the abuse of powers, not for the sale of milliseconds. The hypothesis I offer cautiously is that in Europe, too, no one has written a rule for such a case, because no one thought it would be needed. The Blanc brothers send their regards.

Finally, a paradox that all three complaints should have put in their first sentence. Trump Media’s defense requires that the information be public from the instant of posting, and that the fifty milliseconds be an accident of physics, the kind of latency the courts have blessed for exchanges. Trump Media’s offer requires that priority be worth a hundred thousand dollars a month, and the company has promised its customers friction for everyone who tries to get the posts any other way. Nobody builds friction into an accident. Whether the gap is nonpublic information in the sense of the statute will take years to decide; what the price proves is what the gap is worth, and what the friction proves is who is widening it. The market has already voted: more than a dozen firms are paying. The price is testimony. And testimony, as every trial lawyer knows, tends to be given against oneself.

Facts and law as of September 26, 2026. The three complaints contain allegations that no court has yet examined; the assessments in this piece are the author’s hypotheses.

Robert Nogacki

Robert Nogacki is a Polish attorney at law (radca prawny), the founder and managing partner of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec (Skarbiec Law Firm), which has operated continuously since 2006.

The law is equal for everyone, but the parties rarely are: on one side stands an organization with time, money, and lawyers, on the other a person with one business, one nest egg, and one life.

Clients rarely come to him with a legal problem. They come with a problem that also has a legal side: an audit that began with a single invoice, money entrusted to someone who has disappeared, a company that has to be passed on before it is too late. Most such matters are decided long before the first letter is written, in decisions made without asking and in deadlines nobody remembered. So he begins by asking how the client got here, not what the client should have done.

He advises entrepreneurs and families from more than a dozen countries, including those whose accounts the tax office has just seized and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning. He defends them in tax audits, customs and fiscal inspections, disputes with the tax authorities, and criminal tax proceedings. He represents victims of investment fraud and Ponzi schemes. He helps families set up family foundations and plan succession, so that a life’s work outlasts a single generation.

Not every case can be won. Every case can be run so that the client knows where they stand. Since 2006 he has represented the victims in the WGI case (Warszawska Grupa Inwestycyjna, the Warsaw Investment Group), one of the longest criminal cases in the history of the Polish financial market, because some things must not be left half finished, even when they take two decades. In the case of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Zonda (Zondacrypto, operated by BB Trade Estonia OÜ), he represents several hundred victims in the criminal investigation conducted by Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office and in the Estonian bankruptcy proceedings.

Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec is listed in the rankings of Poland’s largest tax advisory firms published by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna and Rzeczpospolita, and it is a four-time recipient (2015 to 2018) of the European Medal awarded by the Business Centre Club and the European Economic and Social Committee. Robert Nogacki publishes regularly, in the press and on the firm’s website, for people who have a problem rather than a law degree, because a legal opinion the client cannot understand protects only the lawyer.

He believes that the best legal advice is the kind that means the client never has to appear in court.