On Thursday, President Donald Trump will sit down for an intimate evening at his Northern Virginia golf club with 220 of his favorite people in the world: a group of cryptocurrency speculators who have spent an estimated $148 million on Trump’s eponymous memecoin, making the president and his associates millions of dollars in the process.
Even by Trump’s standards, this dinner will be the culmination of one of the most cartoonish episodes of executive-branch graft in recent memory. Last month, Trump announced that at the end of a predetermined period, he would host an “unforgettable Gala DINNER” for the top 220 holders of $TRUMP, allowing winners to discuss the future of the industry with the “Crypto President” himself. The top 25 token holders would also get to attend an “Exclusive Reception” with Trump, along with a “Special VIP White House Tour.” (Hours after the contest went live, its website was quietly edited to promise the top 25 finishers only a “Special VIP Tour,” with no location specified. It remains unclear whether that event will indeed take place at the White House, or at a golf resort facility of the president’s choice.)
The contest’s organizer, a Trump-affiliated LLC called Fight Fight Fight, maintained an online leaderboard of those jockeying for position during the sweepstakes, which ended on May 12. The website also includes helpful information about the dress code (black tie optional) and the plus-one policy (none, because “if you earned a seat at the table, it’s because you earned it”).
For Trump, the logistical details were far less important than the chance to juice the market for $TRUMP, which had cratered after launching in January but then spiked by more than 50% when he announced the contest. In the two days that followed, the Trump Organization and its affiliates, which together control roughly 80% of the token’s supply, took in nearly $1 million in trading fees; by the end of the sweepstakes, that number had jumped to $3 million, according to a Washington Post analysis.
In all, the Post estimates that since the coin’s debut four months ago, Trump and company have made $312 million from crypto sales and $43 million in fees. As it turns out, one of the perks of being the person in charge of U.S. cryptocurrency policy is the freedom to profit off of cryptocurrency without fear of meaningful consequences.
The details of the frenzy to secure a spot on the leaderboard make clear just how for sale the federal government is right now. Making the top 220, according to Wired, required holding or buying more than 4,000 $TRUMP tokens worth about $55,000 altogether; those who made the VIP list held an average of 325,000 tokens worth a collective $4.3 million. Many of the people who made the cut made their purchases on exchanges that suggest they are non-U.S. residents who jumped at the chance to bend the U.S. president’s ear in a semiprivate setting. Sure enough, although the leaderboard identifies winners only by username and alphanumeric crypto wallet address, among the confirmed attendees are Justin Sun, a Chinese crypto speculator who is, in a wild coincidence, trying to settle civil fraud charges with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission; an Australian crypto entrepreneur who hopes to pitch Trump on adopting an even more industry-friendly regulatory stance; and a to-be-determined representative of MemeCore, a Singapore-based crypto collective that told New York magazine that whomever it sends hopes to ask Trump, “Are you a meme, or the result of one?”
Fight Fight Fight calculated the value of contestants’ holdings based on both the amount of $TRUMP in a wallet and the length of time they’d held it, thus rewarding early investors for their commitment to padding the president’s bottom line. That said, earlier this month, the journalist Molly White found that of the wallets on the leaderboard at the time, 62% started buying $TRUMP only after he dangled the dinner invitation. Once acquiring a floundering memecoin came with a shot at a sit-down with the literal President of the United States, people who were previously uninterested apparently decided to reevaluate their investment priorities.
Since the event is closed to the press, there will be no independent coverage of what Trump says to attendees, or what the attendees say to Trump, or even who the attendees are. The entire spectacle amounts to an off-the-record jam session between a bunch of people who have already gotten rich off crypto, brainstorming ways to keep getting rich off crypto.
For Trump, the event is only the latest celebration of his whirlwind romance with crypto, which he spent years disparaging before realizing that embracing it could help fast-track his return to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He positioned himself as the pro-crypto candidate on the campaign trail last year, promising to create a national crypto stockpile and appoint industry luminaries to prominent administration roles. In another wild coincidence, around the same time, his adult sons helped launch World Liberty Financial, a crypto project structured to funnel 75% of revenue to the Trump family. WLF was basically a hedge against the results of the 2024 election: Even if Trump lost, he would at least have a new source of income to pay his legal bills.
The fact that Trump won that election, of course, has made this alliance even more successful for everyone involved. In the hours before his inauguration, the price of Bitcoin spiked to nearly $110,000, then an all-time high. Demand for World Liberty Financial’s coins exploded, too, especially from foreign investors whom federal law bars from giving directly to presidential campaigns or inaugural funds. (Sun, who will attend Thursday’s dinner, has spent nearly $75 million on WLF tokens, making him its single largest known investor.) More recently, Abu Dhabi announced that it would use a WLF-issued stablecoin, USDI1, for its state-backed investment firm’s $2 billion deal with the crypto exchange Binance—a choice that just so happens to put tens of millions of dollars in the Trump family’s pockets.
In an interview with the New York Times earlier this year, Eric Trump spoke of the family’s pivot to crypto in glowing terms, describing World Liberty Financial as “one of the more successful things we’ve ever done.” The numbers bear this out: In March, Fortune estimated that Trump’s crypto holdings were worth $2.9 billion—not bad for an asset he was dismissing as “not money,” “highly volatile,” and “based on thin air” a few years earlier.
Pundits often describe Trump’s involvement in crypto as “unprecedented,” and in a sense, this is right: Given Washington’s enduring obsessions with political scandals and conflicts of interest, traditionally, sitting presidents have not developed active side hustles in industries they have the power to regulate. But Trump has never cared about adhering to norms like this one, because he has always viewed the power of the office he holds primarily in terms of its potential to make him wealthier. He agreed to shake hands with a couple hundred crypto enthusiasts this week for the only reason he has ever done anything: He saw a chance to make money, and no one stopped him from taking it.
