President Donald Trump’s teleprompter operator, Gabriel Perez, is out of a job after he reportedly made six figures betting on the contents of Trump’s speeches, which, of course, Perez could read before almost anyone else.
When the news broke, Trump put Perez on unpaid leave immediately, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called his behavior a “disgrace.”
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It’s natural that Trump would be upset. After all, Perez wasn’t giving Trump a cut.
Around the same time Perez left the White House, the Trump Media and Technology Group announced it would be selling early access to the president’s market-moving social media posts.
TMTG is one of Trump’s businesses. As of the end of 2025, Trump owned about 40% of the company through a personal trust. The company owns and operates Truth Social, a knockoff of Twitter that Trump launched in 2022 after Big Tech firms, including Twitter, banned him from their platforms in the wake of the January 6 riots.
Trump’s company just announced it is selling a top-shelf product called Truth API. This gives anyone willing to pay Trump tens of thousands of dollars an early look at the posts by the “highest-ranking Truth Social accounts.”
Nobody cares what the “highest-ranking Truth Social accounts” say. Lots of people care about the posts from one particular account, @RealDonaldTrump. Nobody will pay a premium to get Trump’s wisdom or wit earlier. Some may pay to get ahead of stock market moves that happen in response to the posts by the president of the United States.
The “firms that prioritize tracking influential Truth posts,” as TMTG’s announcement describes its potential customers, are investors who want to buy and sell stocks based on the policies Trump announces on his platform.
“The president’s social media posts could be more important than the actual economic data,” reported Fortune last year.
When Trump threatened Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Truth Social and called him a “major loser,” the Dow dropped nearly 1,000 points. When Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs, stocks fell about 10% over two days. When Trump announced a pause on those tariffs, stocks rebounded about the same 10%.
Crucially, Trump wasn’t simply reporting news that moved markets. Trump’s posts themselves were moving markets.
“We’re one Truth Social post away from being up or down 5% every day,” a JPMorgan portfolio manager said on CNBC last year. “The data is almost secondary at this point.”
If you can get a few seconds ahead of the rest of the market on those posts, you can make a ton of money, similar to how Perez’s advance warning allegedly allowed him to haul in riches.
But if Perez did what he is said to have done, he profited from Trump without kicking anything back to him. Truth API is a way for Trump to collect a toll from anyone who wants to profit off his proclamations.
It’s probably legal. It’s certainly an abuse of power. It’s also totally in keeping with Trump’s character.
The author of The Art of the Deal is thoroughly transactional. He is the quid pro quo president.
It’s worth considering his pardon of corrupt former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a self-proclaimed “Trumpocrat.” Blagojevich in 2008 tried to sell an appointment to the U.S. Senate after Barack Obama ascended from the Senate to the White House. Blago laid out his philosophy: “I’ve got this thing, and it’s f***ing golden. And I’m just not giving it up for f***in’ nothing. I’m not going to do it.”
This is Trump’s philosophy, too. You see it in how he treats allies — for instance, he complained about U.S. aid to Ukraine because “the United States will get nothing back.”
Trump, in 2016, when he was mocking Marco Rubio for his awkward drink of water during a nationally televised speech, noted that Rubio even showed the label (Poland Spring) on the bottle. Giving someone free advertising is a crime in Trump’s mind.
Trump is hardly the first self-dealing politician in America. The Clintons were always on the make. Hundreds of Bush and Obama insiders monetized their “public service.” Joe Biden’s family corruptly enriched itself through insider-influence peddling.
But the Swamp Economy of the Trump era is a bit different: Nobody gets to cash out his insider status without first kicking a few bucks back to the Big Guy.
