Trump Blatantly Tries to Manipulate Markets With Truth Social Scheme

The thin veil that has historically clouded government corruption is in the trash—under the current Trump administration, blatant ethical misconduct is in.

Truth Social executives announced Thursday that the company would sell Wall Street firms premier access to Donald Trump’s market-rattling online posts, granting traders an advantage over the general public with regard to anticipating stock market fluctuations due to the president’s social media habits.

The product, marketed as “Truth API,” apparently aims to make fast cash by sanitizing insider trading, an illegal activity that is actively investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Truth API is expected to provide continuous 24/7 coverage, as well as access to an archive of the president’s posts on the site dating back to 2022.

Truth Social is owned by Trump Media & Technology Group. Its board of directors is run by Boris Epshteyn—one of the president’s personal attorneys—and Donald Trump Jr., according to the company’s website.

“Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” said Kevin McGurn, interim executive chief officer of Trump Media, in a statement. “As adoption grows, we expect Truth API to become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company, creating lasting value for shareholders.”

Yet it’s far from the first time that the Trump family has attempted to use its power and political prestige to milk money from the American public. Trump has made bank since reassuming office through stock trading, cryptocurrency, and even suing news media organizations. Before that, he had a long list of election-year hustles, including launching a remarkably ugly sneaker and a limited-edition, $60 God Bless the USA Bible co-promoted by “God Bless the USA” singer Lee Greenwood (a Bible that was ultimately forced on Oklahoma public schools by the state’s MAGA superintendent at the expense of local taxpayers).

Trump’s sons have joined in too. In April, Eric Trump openly bragged about winning a multimillion-dollar defense contract from his father’s administration. Donald Trump Jr. and his brother have also invested in multiple defense tech firms that either have or are seeking contracts with the Department of Defense.

A sitting senator proposed annexing Greenland on the wild assumption that Denmark may, in the coming decades, become an Islamic theocracy.

Republican Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri appeared Thursday on The Charlie Kirk Show, where he supported President Donald Trump’s ongoing ambitions to take over Greenland. The subject shot back into the news cycle this month when the president reiterated that he believes the Danish territory “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark” while at the NATO summit.

Among the reasons Schmitt gave for backing Trump’s pipe dream: “I don’t know what Denmark’s government looks like in 50 years. It could be run by a bunch of radical mullahs or something, I don’t really know.”

The prediction exemplifies just how commonplace wingnuttery has become among even the Republican Party’s most prominent and powerful members.

Schmitt may have cribbed the theory from crank conservative commentator Glenn Beck, who expressed support for U.S. control of Greenland earlier this year because, by his lights, Europe is on course to become “a nuclear-armed Islamic caliphate in 10 years,” in which “Denmark’s not Denmark anymore.”

The ICE agent who shot and killed a 26-year-old in Biddeford, Maine, is a former police officer who his ex-wife says was abusive.

David Michael Brouillette was identified by his ex-wife, Ashley Brouillette, as the ICE agent who fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, the Portland Press-Herald reports. Ashley told the newspaper over the phone Thursday afternoon that her former husband had called her admitting to the shooting and defending his actions.

“He was asking me to lie for him and to cover for his character,” Ashley Brouillette said to the Press-Herald. “I told him that I was not going to lie for him. And then he tried to say that it was a justified shooting because the guy tried to hit him with his car.

“In his head it’s justified. He’s unusually calm about it,” she said, adding that she had seen videos of the incident and did not believe his story.

David Brouillette is a licensed real estate agent and veteran who has worked for law enforcement and public safety agencies in the past. His former wife said that she had warned his military superiors about his mental health, and that he was abusive to her. ICE reportedly hired Brouillette earlier this year.

Brouillette previously worked as a police officer at a Department of Veterans Affairs facility in Chelsea, Maine, in 2021. As an Army veteran, he had been receiving disability benefits through the VA, and told a judge he had to resign as a truck driver before January 2025 due to health concerns.

In 2024 and 2025, he was a volunteer firefighter in Manchester, Maine, only working there for two short stints before being removed due to disputes with department leadership, including a shouting match and refusing to follow superiors’ orders.

Donald Trump’s eponymously named childhood investment accounts might not survive his own administration’s cost-cutting measures.

The Trump Accounts program was officially launched on Independence Day, offering $1,000 deposits in Treasury-held funds for Americans born between 2025 and 2028. The administration has since been on a marketing kick trying to figure out how to get Americans to utilize the new initiative, including an effort by the Social Security Administration to develop a process that would automatically enroll newborns in Trump Accounts when they receive their Social Security numbers, Newsweek reported Thursday.

A Trump official committed the administration to the task earlier this week, telling Newsweek that the “goal” was to have “every American child own a Trump Account.”

But researchers that specialize in the implementation of government program enrollment argue that the expensive operation—and its novel implementation—could be at risk due to another Trump campaign priority: government-wide short-staffing caused by the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency.

“The administration would need to invest heavily in outreach and support to help people understand what the accounts are, how they enroll in them, and then how they use them,” Pamela Herd, a professor of social policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, told Newsweek. “But given DOGE cuts to federal agencies, from the IRS to U.S. Digital Services, I don’t believe they have that capacity.”

White House spokesperson Kush Desai described Herd’s analysis as an “idiotic suggestion” and said there is “no workforce-related bottleneck depressing Trump Account signups.”

“In fact, parents don’t need to interact with a single government worker to sign their kids up for Trump Accounts,” Desai told Newsweek. “They can seamlessly do so by heading to TrumpAccounts.gov and filling out a quick and simple online form.”

Trump Accounts were tacked on as a stipulation for the president’s One Big, Beautiful Bill tax plan last year, which offered whopping tax cuts for corporations and the ultrawealthy while gutting social programs such as Medicaid. Weeks after the bill was signed into law, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent referred to the Trump Accounts as a “backdoor for privatizing Social Security.”

“Social Security is a defined benefit plan paid out to the extent that if, all of a sudden, these accounts grow and you have in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for your retirement, then that’s a game changer, too,” Bessent said in July 2025.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed, despite evidence to the contrary, that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance agree on the value of pursuing negotiations with Iran.

In a Thursday press conference, Elina Shirazi of The Daily Mail noted contradictory statements made recently by the president and the second-in-command on whether U.S.-Iran talks are worthwhile.

Namely, Trump said the following last week of Iranians and their leadership: “They’re scum. They’re sick people.… They’re vicious, violent people.… It’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars.… There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo.”

But Vance, appearing on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience that aired Wednesday, said, “I’m very frustrated by the Americans, and frankly by people in other countries, who are like, ‘You cannot negotiate with the Iranians.’” Going further, he called the sentiment “fundamentally idiotic” and said those who espouse it “do not actually have a solution”—apparently unaware that he was describing a belief expressed by his boss just days earlier.

“Respectfully, I do think you’re taking comments from different times throughout this conflict,” Leavitt told Shirazi, adding, “I can tell you the president and vice president are on the exact same page about where we are right now in this conflict.”

She also argued that the hot-and-cold negotiations were a sign of how successful U.S. attacks on Iran have been.