[ed. For this guy that's really saying something, and it's hardly even a news story...]
Yet this and more is what Donald Trump just did, and unless you follow the news quite closely, it’s possible you’ve not even heard about it. Or if you have, it was probably in passing, one of those second-tier, “this is kind of interesting” headlines. But it’s a lot more than that. As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy noted Wednesday: “This isn’t Trump just being Trump. The Trump coin scam is the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. Not close.”
Trump announced this week that the top 220 buyers of his $Trump (strump, as in strumpet) meme coin between now and mid-May will be invited to an exclusive dinner on May 22 (“a night to remember”) at his golf club outside Washington, D.C. The Washington Post and other outlets have reported that in the days since the announcement, “buyers have poured tens of millions of dollars” into the coin; further, that the holders of 27 crypto wallets have acquired at least 100,000 coins apiece, “stakes worth about a million dollars each.” Holders of crypto wallets are anonymous, if they want to be, so the identities of these people (or businesses or countries or sovereign wealth funds or whatever they might be) are unknown and will presumably remain so until the big dinner or, who knows, maybe for all time.
It’s also worth noting that Trump launched this meme coin just a few days before inauguration. Its value quickly shot up to around $75. It steadily declined through the first month of his presidency, and by early April, as Americans grew weary of a president who was tanking the economy, it had fallen to $7.14.
Mind you, a meme coin is a thing with no intrinsic value. It’s just some … thing that somebody decides to launch based on hype because they can get a bunch of suckers to invest in it. As Investopedia gingerly puts it: “Most meme coins are usually created without a use case other than being tradable and convertible.” It should come as no surprise that some meme coins are tied to right-wing politics. Elon Musk named his Department of Government Efficiency after his favorite meme coin, dogecoin (which, in turn, was indeed named after an actual internet meme in which doge is slang for a Shiba Inu dog).
So, to go back to my opening analogy—this isn’t even like Joe and Hunter Biden starting a company from the White House. A company is a real thing. It makes a product or provides a service. It files papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It pays taxes. It employs people. Assuming that it’s a good corporate citizen and that it exists at least in part to solve some problem or offer the public some innovation, it contributes to the general welfare.
Not so a meme coin. It’s just a hustle. It may make certain investors rich, but it does the world no good whatsoever.
So stop and think about this. First, Trump, preparing for the presidency, purportedly busy thinking about how many millions of people he’s going to deport and how he’s going to bring “Jina” to its knees and how he’s going to hand eastern Ukraine to Putin and how he’s going to cut Meals on Wheels, for Chrissakes, takes time out from all that to stop and think: Now, how can I profit from returning to the White House? So he launches, naturally, the griftiest Christmas present ever.
It starts out great. Then its value drops by 90 percent. So in April, while he’s illegally deporting legal U.S. residents to El Salvador and roiling the world’s financial markets, he stops and takes the time to think: Hey, what happened with my meme coin? I had better figure out a way to goose this grift. So he comes up with this dinner. As well as showing just how tawdry his mind is, how he just automatically and intrinsically thinks it’s his right to make a buck from the presidency, it’s unspeakably corrupt. (One small silver lining here is that after peaking Wednesday at almost $15, it’s now under $12.)
Who knows who these “investors” are? Will we ever know? Inevitably, on May 22, people will be invited to that dinner. Will we know the guest list? Will the list be sanitized? Will a few Russian oligarchs be among the top 220 but send surrogates to keep their identity hidden?
This doesn’t create the “appearance” of corruption or set up the “potential” for conflict of interest. It is corruption, and it’s a standing conflict of interest. Patently, and historically. Chris Murphy is right: This is the most corrupt thing any president has ever done, by a mile.
by Michael Tomasky, TNR | Read more:
Image: Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg/Getty Images
[ed. Grifters gotta grift, it's just like breathing. See also:Trump’s Crypto Dinner Guests Admit They’re Trying to Buy Him Off; and, Here’s What Happened at Trump’s Shady Cryptocurrency Dinner (TNR): (more here, with video!). Really awful.]
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"The dinner was held at Trump’s private golf club in northern Virginia on Thursday evening for the top 220 holders of the president’s meme coin cryptocurrency—after an auction that brought in $147,586,796.41. Protesters lined the entrance to the building, chanting “Shame, shame, shame!” and holding up signs while attendees arrived.The event was promoted as the “most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the world,” according to an email. While the top 220 buyers got into the gala, the top 25 buyers received a much more personal, “ultra-exclusive private VIP reception” and “Special VIP Tour” with Trump, allowing them unfettered access to the president. (...)"
“Donald Trump’s dinner is an orgy of corruption. That’s what this is all about,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said that evening. “Donald Trump is using the presidency of the United States to make himself richer through crypto, and he’s doing it right out there in plain sight. He is signaling to anyone who wants to ask for a special favor—and is willing to pay for it—exactly how to do that.
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Guests at Trump’s supposedly “intimate” gala for the 220 top buyers of the $TRUMP memecoin gathered at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia Thursday night, hoping for a little facetime with the president. But they were left entirely unsatisfied.
Nicholas Pinto, a 25-year-old social media influencer who spent a whopping $360,000 on the president’s memecoin, told Fortune that he was distinctly underwhelmed by the affair.
Trump, rather than cozy up to his guests, gave an address to the room that was “pretty much like bullshit,” Pinto said. Most guests struggled to get any face time with the president, according to Pinto. The event’s host Caitlin Sinclair, an anchor at OANN, said that she didn’t even get a picture with the commander-in-chief, Pinto recalled.
Christoph Heuermann, who shared a series of photographs from the event on his Instagram page, wrote that Trump gave a brief 20-minute speech “and didn’t interact with the crowd other than enjoying being celebrated.”
Only the 25 biggest investors were given access to a small VIP reception with Trump. The rest were left with only their halibut or filet mignon.
During the banquet, Pinto texted Fortune to say that the food was “trash.”
“Walmart steak, man,” he wrote." (...)
On average, each person had spent roughly $1.8 million on the president’s meme coin, in what many critics have called a blatant pay-for-access scheme.
