As the former president and Republican front-runner for the 2024 election, Donald Trump has quite a pull on social media.
He has also been facing significant financial hurdles. After several criminal trials and funding a second presidential campaign, Trump is seeing hundreds of millions of dollars in liability.
An Intelligencer report from earlier this year revealed Trump was forced to pay $91 million for his defamation of writer E. Jean Carroll and would be responsible for at least $300 million over the next few months.
While Trump acquired $3.3 billion in stock from his social media platform Truth Social this year, much of his funds have been locked away until later this year.
However, with roughly 90 million followers on X alone and a strong base of followers and supporters, Trump’s money problems could likely disappear if he became a full-force influencer.
Influencers are social media users who profit from their content and product endorsements. While the amount of money you make can vary, experts say those with more than 1 million followers are likely to make more than $2,000 per post.
That number could be as high as $100,000 per post for Trump.
While many are concerned about the ethical and legal ramifications of a president becoming a social media influencer, some believe Trump could easily ignore those concerns and move full steam ahead into the influencing space.
“Trump has not shied away from promoting products, whether his own or others, like The Apprentice sponsors,” Jack Bratich, a journalism and media professor at Rutgers University, told Newsweek. “It would be an absurd spectacle to see him tout one defense contractor over another, but I see no reason why he would put up ethical barriers here. And I’m sure the companies would see it as a strategic new lobbying technique.”
Would It Be Legal?
Daniel Tsai, a lawyer specializing in business law, said Trump has, in many ways, already been an influencer for long before it ever became a marketing term for social media.
“His ability to profit would not necessarily be directly from his posts but in terms of the indirect benefits that the targets of his posts might receive such as additional publicity or endorsements,”
As a president, Trump would be limited by domestic and foreign emolument clauses in the U.S. Constitution that ban direct or indirect domestic or foreign benefits. These clauses were passed to generally prevent the president from being corrupted by outside influencers.
“It would be both illegal and unethical for the president to directly or indirectly benefit in a material way from their social media posts,” Tsai said.
However, Tsai said Trump has already broken traditional norms of appropriate presidential behavior and wouldn’t be surprised if he did the same on the internet.
“It’s possible he could try to push the envelope on profiting from acting as an influencer through product and company endorsements,” Tsai said.
Trump previously caused a spike in sales of certain medications when he suggested they could treat COVID-19, and he’s also continued to promote the Trump brand with his Mar-a-Lago and golf resort properties.
Federal ethics regulations have long prohibited federal employees from using their office for “private gain,” but enforcement against high-ranking officials in the White House has tended to be “scarce and lax,” said Anatoliy Gruzd, a professor of information technology management and social media expert at Toronto Metropolitan University.
When Trump’s adviser, Kellyanne Conway, endorsed Ivanka Trump‘s accessories and clothing line in 2017, there were no significant sanctions or consequences for the White House employee.
The New York Times reported this summer that Trump previously earned $300,000 for simply endorsing a copy of the Bible.
“If Trump is elected and decides to break the ethics rules, I don’t see any mechanism to enforce those rules against him other than an impeachment hearing in Congress,” Gruzd told Newsweek. “And we all know how that went last time.”
