ECHOES OF THE INKWELL — The editors of this page occasionally invite the great wits and observers of ages past — reconstructed through the miracle of artificial intelligence — to cast their eyes upon the present day. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The Sage of Baltimore on the Monetization of the Presidential Utterance
By H. L. Mencken (1880–1956, reconstructed by artificial intelligence)
A new product has come to market in these United States, and it is, I submit, the most honest thing to emerge from Washington in living memory — honest not in the sense of being truthful, but in the sense of being perfectly, nakedly transparent about what it is and what it costs and who it is for.
The product is called the Truth API. It is offered by Trump Media & Technology Group, the holding company that operates the social media platform Truth Social, and what it proposes to sell, at a reported price of one hundred thousand dollars per month, is time. Specifically, several milliseconds of time — one millisecond being one-thousandth of a second — during which the purchaser may read whatever the President of the United States has just posted on his personal social media account before the general public is permitted to do the same.
That is the product. That is the offer. One hundred thousand dollars a month for a few thousandths of a second’s head start on the public utterances of the Chief Executive of the American Republic.
I have been a student of American political enterprise for the better part of my life, and I confess that even I am briefly, pleasantly startled. Not by the corruption of the thing — that is standard issue, available in every administration at varying price points — but by the sheer elegance of the architecture. Previous generations of influence-peddlers were forced to conduct their business in the shadows, through intermediaries, with plausible deniability and layers of legal insulation. This operation has filed a press release.
The mechanism is as follows: the President posts his thoughts — on tariffs, on wars, on which companies have pleased or displeased him on a given morning — and these thoughts move markets. They have always moved markets; this is now an established fact of American financial life, as reliable as the tides. When he announced his sweeping tariffs last year, stocks fell nearly five percent within hours of his Truth Social post, which preceded the formal Rose Garden announcement by some considerable margin. When he reversed himself and posted that it was a great time to buy, the market added four trillion dollars in value that same afternoon. These are not trivial numbers. These are the movements of the global economy responding to a single man’s social media activity.
The genius of the Truth API is in recognizing this reality and billing for it. Why should the great financial institutions of the world receive this information at the same moment as any ordinary citizen with a telephone? That is democratic in principle, certainly, but democracy has never been known for its profitability. The high-frequency trading firms — those organizations whose business model consists of executing transactions in fractions of a second, skimming fortunes from the gap between what a thing costs now and what it will cost in eleven milliseconds — have an obvious and substantial interest in receiving the President’s thoughts slightly before everyone else. Trump Media proposes to meet that interest at the going rate.
The critics have called this corruption. The critics are, in the technical sense, correct, but they are missing the aesthetic dimension. This is corruption refined to its purest form, stripped of all the customary pretense. The fig leaf has been not merely removed but pressed, framed, and offered for sale alongside the original.
The democracy, I have long argued, deserves what it gets. On this occasion it is getting a subscription service.
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) was the Baltimore Sun’s most celebrated — and most feared — journalist and essayist. These words were composed by artificial intelligence in his voice and spirit. The editors note that Mencken would almost certainly have had something cutting to say about that, too.
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