In the early nineties I used to go to the dogs at Walthamstow with a man called Terry, who sold tips in brown envelopes for a fiver a time.
He had a sheepskin coat, a biro behind each ear, and the unshakeable confidence of a man who had once, in 1987, correctly predicted six winners in a row.
Terry’s genius was not knowing which dog would win. Terry’s genius was understanding that a queue will always form behind anyone who claims to know first. The envelope was nonsense, but the fiver was real, and the queue never got shorter.
I thought of Terry last week when Trump Media announced something called Truth API. For those who missed it, this is a paid data feed that will deliver posts from Truth Social’s ten most influential accounts, up to and including the President of the United States, to banks and trading firms milliseconds before the rest of humanity gets the push notification. The pitch price, according to reporting on the proposed subscription fees, is up to $100,000 a month, with a discount if you sign for three years, like a gym membership for market manipulation.
Let us be clear about what is being sold here. Donald Trump’s posts move markets. A stray capitalised sentence about tariffs can vaporise billions from the S&P before the man has finished his breakfast. And the company he founded, in which his family trust holds a controlling stake, now proposes to sell early sight of those market-moving pronouncements to the highest-frequency bidder, with the whole apparatus set to go live for institutional customers in August.
This is Terry’s envelope, except Terry now owns the dog, owns the track, decides when the hare starts running, and has a seat in the Royal Box of the government that regulates greyhound racing. If I had described this arrangement to you ten years ago you would have assumed it was a rejected plotline from Succession, and a bit on the nose at that.
And here is the part that genuinely frightens me. It is not the scheme itself, brazen as it is. It is the silence. The prospect of a sitting president’s company charging Wall Street for advance access to his own policy signals has raised what the ethics experts politely call serious concerns about conflicts of interest, and then everyone has moved briskly on to the next outrage. No congressional uproar. No emergency hearing. Not even a strongly worded letter, and Washington produces strongly worded letters the way Cornwall produces pasties. A shrug, a news cycle, gone.
We have arrived, with remarkable speed, at a place where one of the most powerful men on earth can do more or less anything, and the response of the institutions built to challenge him is a weary rustle of papers.
I wrote last year, after seeing George Clooney’s Broadway revival, about the slow death of the fourth estate, and I confess I worried at the time that I was over-egging it. I was not. Since then CBS has cancelled its most-watched satirist to keep the White House sweet, a story I covered when Colbert took his final bow, and marched Scott Pelley out of 60 Minutes for the crime of doing journalism. The watchdog has not fallen asleep. It has been taken to the vet and quietly put down.
Business readers will recognise the principle being shredded here, because British companies live under it every day. It is the level informational playing field. Any UK plc with market-moving news must release it through a regulated news service, to every investor, at the same second. Brief your mates in the City first and the FCA will want a word, and possibly your liberty. We built that regime because markets run on trust, and trust runs on the belief that nobody with power is selling the answers out of the back door.
That belief is the actual product. Not the shares, not the bonds. The belief. It is why a pension fund in Leeds will buy American assets at all, and why capital stays cheap enough for the rest of us to borrow. Price the belief away at $100,000 a month and everyone pays, in wider spreads, higher risk premiums and the corrosive suspicion that the game is rigged because, demonstrably, it now is. And when trust gets expensive, it is never the hedge funds who pick up the bill. It is the small firms at the bottom of the capital food chain, which is to say, most of my readers.
Insider trading is a crime because information and power must not be allowed to marry. This scheme is the wedding, the reception and the honeymoon, conducted in public, with a card machine at the door.
Terry, at least, had the decency to seal the envelope. And to my knowledge he never once owned the dog.
