Donald Trump’s scheme to sell early access to his Truth Social posts for $100,000 a month is a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional violation to personally enrich himself that must be stopped.
The scam began charging willing buyers on Aug. 1 and the first lawsuit landed before Manhattan Federal Judge J. Paul Oetken on Thursday, filed by the media organization The Intercept in tandem with the Freedom of the Press Foundation. We hope that this case will advance briskly forward and definitively put an end to this naked corruption.
Trump is well aware that there are numerous organizations ranging from Wall Street trading firms to large news outlets that carefully read each of his posts, which do everything from declaring military attacks to issuing federal government policy and personnel announcements.
There’s a word for forcing someone to pay high sums for formerly free things that they need; that word is extortion. That the president of the United States has unleashed this effort to extort millions of dollars a month that will go directly to his and his family’s pockets while adding nothing of value is barely even a top 10 scandal of the month for him, yet it would have probably ended pretty much any presidency prior to his. This is the scale of his corruption and unfitness.
In response, Truth Social has absurdly claimed that the lawsuit amounts to censorship. It would be ridiculous for any president’s cronies to claim that a challenge to this policy amounts to censorship, but it is especially ridiculous for the lackeys of an administration that has made it a mission to use rhetorical, legal and administrative tools to shut down dissent and persecute critical journalists and unfriendly political movements and organizations.
Just this past week, we found out that the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security had launched extravagant and expansive operations to survey and obtain records from left-leaning groups ranging from local community organizations in Minnesota opposing the ICE crackdown in that state to some of the largest unions in the country.
Federal officials argued, in effect, that the simple fact that these groups were broadly aligned on certain left-leaning political objectives made them a criminal conspiracy. That’s censorship, not demanding that the president’s social media pronouncements — which he himself treats as tantamount to official policy announcements and directives — be freely available to the public all at the same time.
Of course, this scheme is coming at a time when Trump Media, Truth Social’s parent, is losing money hand over fist, having failed to turn its flagship product — essentially just a Twitter replica for the MAGA crowd — into a profitable enterprise. As usual, Trump is utterly unable to make money through legitimate business practices and his financial success has come as a result of grift and corruption.
For him, this is what the presidency is: not one of the weightiest responsibilities on the planet, where careful decision-making will guide the fate of millions, but an opportunity for him and his family to make money and avoid accountability.
This he should not be allowed to do. The presidency is not a money-making opportunity, and both the courts and Congress must block and claw back the ill-gotten profits from this un-American affront.