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The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation sued President Donald Trump and his staff Wednesday, challenging a Trump-owned media company’s plan to monetize the president’s social media posts.
The lawsuit is in response to a scheme announced last month by the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social platform to charge as much as $100,000 per month for early access to the president’s posts.
By offering preferred access to presidential missives, the monetization plan, dubbed “Truth API,” would violate the First Amendment rights of journalists and other members of the public to equal access to official information, the lawsuit argues, while allowing Trump to trade his public statements for cold hard cash.
“Trump is trying to enrich himself by privatizing government information that he has no right to sell,” said Ben Muessig, editor-in-chief of The Intercept. “We won’t let it stand.”
The complaint filed in the Southern District of New York also asserts that the monetization scheme, which it described as an “out-and-out plan of extortion,” would violate the Fifth Amendment by charging “unreasonable sums” for equal access to government information and by undermining the right to equal protection under the law.
“This lawsuit seeks to vindicate the principle that the president of the United States cannot profit from the official government statements of the president,” said Nikhel Sus, Chief Counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which provided legal support for the lawsuit. “Every American is entitled to equal access to the president’s public statements. Individuals who pay $100,000 to the president’s personal company do not have any greater entitlement to those public statements.”
“Every American is entitled to equal access to the president’s public statements.”
Truth API is part of a broader effort to bring Trump Media & Technology Group into the black. Despite a steep up-front cost ranging from $60,000 to $100,000 per month, the company’s interim CEO Kevin McGurn has been explicit about the potential dividends awaiting customers willing to pay — and the potential gain for Trump and other shareholders.
“Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream,” McGurn said in a July 16 press release. “As adoption grows, we expect Truth API to become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company, creating lasting value for shareholders.”
No shareholder stands to benefit more than Trump, who holds the largest single stake in the company through a trust established when he retook the White House in January 2025. At the time, his 52.1 percent stake in the company was valued at $4 billion. The company’s stock has plunged in value since entering the market, causing the value of Trump’s stake to fall to around $1 billion, according to the complaint.
In addition to the president, the lawsuit names as defendants Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Daniel Scavino, the Executive Office of the President, and the White House Office. Representatives for the defendants and for Trump Media did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Truth Social has its roots in the interregnum between the two Trump administrations, when Trump, an early adopter of X who used the platform extensively in his first term as president, was banned from his beloved app and other social media platforms in 2021 in the wake of the attempted insurrection on January 6.
Weeks after the ban, he formed Trump Media & Technology Group and announced plans for a proprietary social media platform to be known as Truth Social. The platform, essentially a right-wing clone of X, launched in 2022, and Trump Media went public in 2024 via a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, a process of entering the stock market that is typically subject to less scrutiny than a traditional initial public offering.
Shortly after acquiring Twitter and renaming it X, Elon Musk allowed Trump back onto the platform, and other social-media companies later followed suit. But Trump has continued to use Truth Social as his first and primary means of communication with the public.
Still, despite enjoying the benefits of Trump’s universal name recognition and the potential for access-granting fringe benefits of investing in the company, Trump Media & Technology Group has been something of a financial loser. Just days after announcing Truth API, McGurn revealed in an earnings call on Monday that second-quarter losses had totaled $238 million.
Despite such dismal numbers, the potential return on investment for parties sinking money into the company goes beyond earnings by acting as a potential side-door for influence peddling and buying access, according to critics. Although his relationship with the administration has recently soured, few cases illustrate this more clearly than that of Justin Sun, a billionaire crypto kingpin who swiftly resolved an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission after investing $30 million in the Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. Other major investors with a clear interest in gaining Trump’s favor have included an Emirati powerbroker and a failed businessman under investigation for money laundering.
“If you look back through the American presidency, there’s really no comparison for this kind of self-enrichment,” said Molly White, a researcher who has written critically of Trump’s crypto ventures and their various backers. “People have made quite a stink in the past about presidents selling books or family members of presidents peddling off of their connections, and that’s certainly true. But I mean, the scale here is just unprecedented.”
Critics of the president have raised similar concerns about Truth API. In a letter to the SEC last month, Sens. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., pointed to numerous instances in which Trump had used Truth Social to hype individual stocks, including CitiGroup, Palantir, and Intel.
“The Trump Administration is the most corrupt in the nation’s history, and questions about inappropriate insider access to information about its policies and actions have raised questions on multiple occasions,” the senators wrote. “But even amid these clouds of corruption, Trump Media’s plan to disseminate market-moving information through the President’s own company, while charging insiders for access ahead of the public for the benefit of his company — and to the detriment of the investing public — represents a shocking abuse of the office of the President and the trust of the American public for his personal gain.”
