The Financial Times reports that Trump's Truth Social posts no longer trigger reliable market reactions the way they once did. Traders still monitor his posts, but the immediate price impact has weakened. What used to be a trading signal now reads more like noise.
This split between media attention and market credibility matters because it exposes a structural problem: newsrooms and trading desks have decoupled. Cable, newsletters, and social feeds will keep amplifying every post for clicks. But money—the real arbiter of belief—has stopped treating them as actionable. Newsrooms and trading desks no longer speak the same language about what counts as news.
The test ahead isn't whether Trump posts something inflammatory. He will. The test is whether newsrooms demand evidence that a post changed policy, moved a regulator, or altered an earnings outlook before they treat it as a market event. Right now they don't.
Attention decay kills potency faster than silence ever could. Truth Social still generates free programming: the clips, the hot takes, the breaking-news chyrons. But repetition wrecks impact. Media built a reflex around his every outburst because that reflex paid in clicks and engagement. The problem is that same reflex now tells readers a post is actionable when it's often just familiar. Less impact doesn't mean less coverage. It means worse calibration—and worse calibration is how you lose audience trust.
Filed to the Media desk · Jul 20