Jack Goldsmith interviews John Coates, a Professor at Harvard Law School and former general counsel of the Securities and Exchange Commission, about the legality of Trump Media’s sale of early access to the president’s Truth Social posts for $100,000 a month. They discuss how the arrangement differs from the low-latency data feeds that Bloomberg and Dow Jones lawfully sell, how the STOCK Act specifies that insider trading laws apply to the president by name, and who may bear legal risk: the president, subscribers, or both. They also consider potential enforcement by a future presidential administration, under New York’s Martin Act, or through private suits.
Mentioned:
“Shadow SEC Statement No. 13: Insider Trading Institutionalized,” CLS Blue Sky Blog (Columbia Law School, September 8, 2026)
Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency (Lawfare Press, 2020)
“Complaint,” in The Intercept Media, Inc. v. Trump, No. 1:26-cv-6867 (United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, August 12, 2026)
This is an edited transcript of an episode of “Executive Functions Chat.” You can listen to the full conversation by following or subscribing to the show on Substack, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Jack Goldsmith: President Trump regularly breaks news on his social media platform, Truth Social, where he posts market-moving presidential and White House announcements. The company now sells faster access to those posts for up to $100,000 a month. The advantage is apparently just 50 milliseconds, but that is enough to benefit traders.
To date, the early access has attracted more than a dozen subscribers. The arrangement effectively lets Trump profit off the presidency. Can this arrangement possibly be lawful?
To answer that question, I’m delighted to have a conversation with my Harvard Law colleague John Coates, the John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics. John served as general counsel of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and before coming to Harvard, he was a partner at Wachtell Lipton, specializing in financial institutions. John, thanks for chatting with me.
John Coates: Happy to be here, Jack.
So did I accurately describe what Trump Media is selling, and is there more to say about that?
Yes, I think you captured it. If you pay roughly $1.2 million a year to Trump Media, you get Trump’s Truth Social postings ever so slightly before they hit the public website. And Truth Social, of course, is Trump’s primary way to talk to the public.
In fairness, just one little nuance: it’s not Trump himself selling this access. It’s Trump Media. He did create that company. He only owns 41% of it. He’s not an officer of it. His stock is in a trust. His son is the trustee. He’s the sole beneficiary of the trust, and Trump can revoke the trust at any time. So I say all that just to be fair. But nevertheless, yes, I think you captured it correctly.
So that’s good. But given that financial arrangement, is it fair to say that he is an ultimate beneficiary, at least in part, of this $100,000-a-month fee?
Yes. He’s directly profiting through his indirect ownership of Trump Media.
John, outside the Truth Social context, isn’t selling low-latency access to already public information a standard business practice done by Bloomberg, Dow Jones, and the like?
Yes. I mean, even 50 milliseconds of a timing advantage is commonly paid for by third parties in the markets. The easiest example is arbitrageurs who are trading in two different markets and see the same asset being traded at slightly different prices. They buy in one, they sell in the other, and the faster they can exploit that gap, hopefully before anybody else does, the more likely they’re going to profit from that. And so they’ll pay millions to co-locate—to physically locate their computer systems very close to the source of whatever information they’re trading on.
But here’s the difference between that, which is pretty common, and what’s going on here. In those situations, the public information is being both produced and sold by a for-profit company, typically either a news source or a market like the New York Stock Exchange. And selling access is something they’re entitled to do. They’re selling the right to get their information in a way that they can profit from the most.
Here, the information that’s being sold certainly doesn’t belong to Trump Media. And I don’t think it credibly belongs to Trump himself either. He’s functioning in a public role when he makes many of these announcements. I suppose you might divide his posts up into those that are just him ranting about his personal things—and maybe that has an effect on the market, and maybe you treat those differently—but when he announces over his posts that we’re going to war, he’s not announcing that as a private citizen or as a businessman. He’s announcing it as president. And that means that someone who’s profiting on that is indirectly paying him to trade in the market ahead of the public, on information that belongs to the public, on a differential basis.
Okay, there’s a lawsuit brought by The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation against Trump’s media company, alleging First and Fifth Amendment violations. But you wrote a really interesting post about why this might be an insider trading violation. Can you explain that? What’s the relevant law here, and why might this be an example of insider trading—if that’s even the right phrase?
Yeah, no, you’ve captured it. So the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, where I used to be—I should disclose I was there in the Biden administration, so I’m not a neutral observer about all this. But I’d like to think I’d say the same thing if it were Biden doing this.
The SEC has long prohibited insider trading through a rule, among others, called Rule 10b-5. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC, does the same thing through its own rule in the derivatives markets, where, say, oil futures trade. One part of both bans says that anyone who’s in a fiduciary role, who’s got trust relationships with other people—a corporate CEO or corporate director is the most typical, but also lawyers and even priests, anybody who’s got some trusting relationship—cannot misappropriate information from whoever they owe the duties to.
In the case of the CEO, if it’s the CEO’s own company and he owns all the stock, fine, he can do whatever he wants. But if he’s CEO of a public company, he owes duties to all the shareholders of that company, and he can’t trade on information that he learns in his role as CEO of a public company without violating Rule 10b-5. Now, there are some exceptions and some nuances to it. But basically, that’s the law.
Now, further, Congress got tired of people complaining about them trading in the stock market. And so they finally passed something called the STOCK Act, which explicitly links the SEC rule that I just described, as well as the CFTC rule, to public status as a member of Congress, as well as to any federal government employee’s role as an employee, including specifically the president. And it says in that statute that these people are fiduciaries for purposes of their government roles, and they’re subject to all those insider trading laws, just like a CEO of a public company would be.
That’s basically the violation. It’s sort of straightforward on some level. If it were a different government official doing this, one the current administration didn’t like, they’d have ample legal room to go after them.
I just want to underscore something you said, because you said a lot of things there. The STOCK Act expressly applies to the president, which is really important for a whole bunch of legal issues. That distinguishes it from lots of other laws, and it arguably gets around a general rule that the president is not subject to criminal or civil statutes that don’t name him explicitly. It explicitly names him.
Yes.
And just say again: What’s the fiduciary duty that it describes?
I mean, it basically just cross-references, explicitly, the SEC rule, the CFTC rule, and all the case law that’s accumulated under them. And one thing you might be thinking here is, well, Trump himself is not trading. But that doesn’t matter, fundamentally. The way the insider trading law that’s hooked to the STOCK Act works, it’s not only the people trading in securities or futures based on material nonpublic information that they get from an insider, a fiduciary, who are in trouble. Likewise, the fiduciary is in trouble if they leak it in a way that they know is going to be used that way. And even worse, if they’re being paid money for that tip—if they’re a paid tipper—they’re just as liable under insider trading law. And therefore, through the STOCK Act, that same set of obligations applies to, take your pick, the speaker of the House, the ranking member on the Senate side, the president.
Trump Media has denied that it’s doing anything illegal here. Has it addressed the insider trading idea?
It certainly has not spelled out any public theory as to why it somehow is exempt. It’s pointed to the thing you asked me about a few minutes ago: people sell early access to private feeds of information all the time. And that’s true. And if that were all that’s going on here, it’d be fine. If it were Truth Social posting something about itself and selling early access to that, and the profit from those sales flowed to the company, they’re entitled to do that, just like Dow Jones could do.
But that’s not this, right? This is an investor in that company who’s also the president selling advance information—not about the company, and not even about his own personal views, but about things he’s about to do on behalf of the public, the nation.
Can you give us examples of the types of things that he has mentioned on Truth Social that might affect markets?
I mean, the war is the easiest, just because oil futures jumped 5 to 10% that day. So if you traded about $25 million 50 milliseconds ahead of anybody else, you’d have earned back the fee for the whole year from that one trade, because the price jumped up that much that day.
But other things—tariffs are clearly market movers in some contexts. There are both companies whose securities move and commodity prices that respond to them. Even if in the end the tariffs turn out to be unauthorized, in the meantime they’re having an effect, and that’s affecting asset prices. So that’s another category. Every time there’s an announcement about the pending war—or wars, I guess, at this point, given the number of countries involved—that will have an effect on diesel price futures. Any of these announcements has the capacity to move markets, because the U.S. is a causal force in the world.
It’s not likely—in fact, it’s impossible—that the Trump Justice Department or the Trump Securities and Exchange Commission is going to do an investigation, much less a prosecution or a civil action against the president. But in theory, before we get to immunity theories and pardons and things like that, is it possible? I mean, what’s the statute of limitations under this law, and is it possible for the next administration to enforce this law, in theory?
Yes. I mean, the default federal statute of limitations is five years, so it goes beyond the current presidency. And that’s the same also for SEC enforcement of its insider trading rule. So the liability, in theory, could extend well into the next administration. Whether a future SEC would have any interest in going after Trump personally after he stops being president, I don’t know.
And this law can be enforced criminally and civilly?
Yes, it’s got both criminal and civil components. The civil side has private rights of action attached to it. Those have shorter statutes of limitations. It’s basically two years from knowledge or five years from when they should have known. So it depends a little bit on how close you are before those suits could be brought. For the SEC, for civil actions, it’s five years.
So you spent a lot of time in your post talking about Trump v. United States, the immunity case, and the very complicated discussion in that case about immunity, which turns on public acts versus private acts. I don’t really want to go into that because, as you said, it’s not clear that Trump will be prosecuted after he leaves office. I think that the discussion of the line between public and private acts in Trump is incoherent, and I think it’s kind of impossible to predict whether immunity would attach if the next administration decided to prosecute.
I’ll just say that Nixon v. Fitzgerald, which is the case that established absolute immunity for the president from damages for official acts, to the outer bounds of his official acts committed in office, left open the possibility that if Congress specified that the president was subject to the law in question, and it was being enforced against him, he might not have immunity. And so it strikes me that if there’s going to be—and I agree that it’s not clear there would be any interest in this—but if there’s going to be a post-Trump legal action against the president, it’s much more likely to be civil, both because of Nixon v. Fitzgerald and because the pardon power, or a self-pardon, wouldn’t apply there. Does that make sense to you?
It does. And the main reason for thinking about the immunity stuff is more that if you were a third party and you were worried about aiding-and-abetting liability, or you might yourself be viewed as trading on material nonpublic information through this channel, you might make the argument that if Trump was immune, then somehow I’m immune. So it may come up even in a civil case, even one not against Trump.
But I agree, and I think that’s where the enforcement risk is greatest currently. One thing I haven’t mentioned: New York has its own version of this law, the Martin Act. The people paying for this feed right now are probably, some of them at least, in New York. If I were their lawyer, I would at a minimum be warning them to do this in a clear-eyed fashion—to recognize that they’re taking on significant risk as a result.
Just to underscore the obvious, I think we’re just going to see massive pardons at the end of this administration.
Everyone: “Can I get a pardon?”
Everybody conceivable, for every one of these schemes going on.
I think it’s going to be in the thousands, if not the tens of thousands. And I mean that very seriously. But that’s not going to help someone subscribing to Truth Social who’s prosecuted, or has a civil suit against them, under state law.
That’s exactly right. And there are also the private lawsuits that I don’t think the pardon affects either.
Could you just say a word about the private lawsuits? Who might bring those claims?
I mean, if you’re a counterparty—if you’re someone who sells slightly after some of these privileged buyers of the feed trade, so that you’re likely trading against them, and your price is therefore affected by their trade, and you can show that with data, which often you can if the price jumps are big enough—you can claw back, and sometimes get a multiple of, what they’ve gained from that. It’s probably not what’s happened to date, but as we approach the end of the administration, or possibly, if there’s a state-level action, even before then.
So we might see a Democratic-controlled Congress, or at least one house, at the end of this year, and we might see a new presidency in 2029. Looking at the situation, is there anything in these laws that you would change to prevent this kind of action? Or is it just that the law is there, but the problem is enforcement?
I think it’s mostly the second. I think it’s mostly, frankly, in the domain of your earlier book rather than in securities law or derivatives law. The one exception to that may be just completely nailing down the ethical constraints, because there’s the extra stuff. Remember, I said he’s got this in a trust, right? But it’s a revocable trust. Let’s actually make the president take all of his businesses and put them into a real trust with a third party, where he really has no control or influence over, or even knowledge of, what they’re doing. That would obviously be one way to avoid this particular mechanism.
Okay, John, that was very elucidating. Thank you very much.
Happy to be here, Jack.
