Hundreds
Join Trump at ‘Exclusive’ Dinner, With Dreams of Crypto Fortunes in Mind
The guests
were the biggest investors in President Trump’s memecoin, and they were greeted
with chants of “shame” as they arrived at Trump National Golf Course.
David
Yaffe-BellanyEric Lipton
By David
Yaffe-Bellany and Eric Lipton
Reporting
from Sterling, Va.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us/politics/trump-memecoin-dinner.html
Published
May 22, 2025
Updated May
23, 2025, 12:48 a.m. ET
President
Trump gathered Thursday evening at his Virginia golf club with the
highest-paying customers of his personal cryptocurrency, promising that he
would promote the crypto industry from the White House as protesters outside
condemned the event as a historic corruption of the presidency.
The gala
dinner held at the Trump National Golf Club in suburban Washington, where Mr.
Trump flew from the White House on a military helicopter, turned into an
extraordinary spectacle as hundreds of guests arrived, many having flown to the
United States from overseas.
At the
club’s entrance, the guests were greeted by dozens of protesters chanting
“shame, shame, shame.”
It was a
spectacle that could only have happened in the era of Donald J. Trump. Several
of the dinner guests, in interviews with The New York Times, said that they
attended the event with the explicit intent of influencing Mr. Trump and U.S.
financial regulations.
“The past
administration made your lives miserable,” Mr. Trump told the dinner guests,
referring to the Biden administration’s enforcement actions against crypto
companies.
The gala
attendees made whooping noises while Mr. Trump spoke, and applauded as the
president declared: “They were going after everybody. It was a disgrace
frankly,” according to a video provided to The Times by a dinner guest.
Look at it.
They’re all dressed up. Why didn’t you tell me that I would have worn a tuxedo.
I just want to tell you, it’s an honor to be with you. We’ve been pushing the
market of crypto and Bitcoin and all of it. Everything and I do it for a
reason, not for me. I really do it because I think it’s the right thing to do.
Everything
and I do it
for a
reason, not for me.
Mr. Trump
promised to change approach. “There is a lot of sense in crypto. A lot of
common sense in crypto,” he said. “And we’re honored to be working on helping
everybody here.”
Mr. Trump
and his business partners organized the dinner to promote sales of his $TRUMP
cryptocurrency, a memecoin launched just days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
A memecoin is a type of digital currency tied to an online joke or mascot; it
typically has no function beyond speculation. But Mr. Trump’s coins have become
a vehicle for investors, including many foreigners, to funnel money to his
family.
The
president’s business partners called the dinner the world’s “most EXCLUSIVE
INVITATION” and posted a leaderboard online that allowed crypto investors to
calculate how many $TRUMP coins they would have to buy to earn one of the 220
seats.
The start of
Mr. Trump’s second term has been punctuated with more than a dozen of these
lucrative transactions for his family and partners: real estate deals from
Qatar to Serbia that involve foreign governments, a new banklike crypto venture
that has pulled in $2 billion from the government of the United Arab Emirates,
a golf tournament at his Miami club sponsored by a Saudi-funded venture. Mr.
Trump is estimated to have added billions to his personal fortune, at least on
paper, since the start of his new term, much of it through crypto.
But none of
these profit-seeking pitches has been more explicit than the memecoin dinner.
The event was unlike anything in recent American history — not a campaign
fund-raiser but a gathering arranged by the president’s business partners to
directly enrich the first family.
As guests
were flowing into the club, protesters held signs with slogans like “Stop
Crypto Corruption,” “Release the guest list” and “No Kings.”
“This is the
crypto corruption club,” Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, yelled at
the entrance to Mr. Trump’s golf course, speaking so loudly that he had to stop
after he lost his voice.
“This is
like the Mount Everest of corruption,” Mr. Merkley said.
At a news
conference on Thursday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt,
rejected any suggestion that Mr. Trump was acting inappropriately by hosting
the dinner.
“It’s absurd
for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the
presidency,” she said before Mr. Trump headed to the club. “This president was
incredibly successful before giving it all up to serve our country publicly.”
Outside the
club, men in tuxedos began gathering by a sign-in table at 5 p.m., collecting
wristbands and raffle tickets as they made their way inside to escape the rain.
Some of the guests flashed foreign passports as a means of identification.
The dinner
menu featured filet mignon and pan-seared halibut, as well as a “Trump organic
field green salad.” Mr. Trump spoke from a lectern adorned with the
presidential seal and with American flags arrayed behind him.
Perhaps the
best known crypto investor at the dinner was Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire
who runs the crypto platform Tron. He spent more than $40 million on $TRUMP
coins, earning himself the top spot on the leaderboard.
Wearing a
black bow tie and accompanied by an assistant who held an umbrella over his
head, Mr. Sun was among the first guests to arrive. In a brief interview at the
club, he told The Times that the dinner would be his first meeting with Mr.
Trump.
“I’m very
excited to meet him and discuss about crypto’s future,” Mr. Sun said.
Sangrok Oh,
a Korean crypto executive, arrived at the dinner with a collection of red
baseball caps emblazoned with the words “Make Crypto Great Again” that he
planned to hand out at the event. He said he had flown all the way from Seoul
to attend the dinner.
“It’s kind
of a fund-raiser” for Mr. Trump, Mr. Oh said in an interview at his hotel in
Virginia. “And he’ll always be good to his sponsors.”
Others
guests included Vincent Liu, the chief investment officer at Kronos Research, a
crypto firm founded in Taiwan. Kronos profits by conducting high-frequency
trading on crypto platforms across the world — except in the United States.
But with a
nod from Mr. Trump and his regulators, Mr. Liu wants to enter the U.S. market.
His firm bought enough of the $TRUMP coins to ensure he had a seat at the
dinner — with the hope he might get Mr. Trump’s ear.
“I will
definitely not hesitate to share my perspective,” Mr. Liu said. “It’s great to
see the current direction that everything’s going.”
Mr. Trump
launched the memecoin just days before his inauguration, setting off a flurry
of trading. Initially, the coin’s price skyrocketed, before it eventually
crashed, costing investors billions of dollars.
The dinner
was designed to fuel more sales. The organizers framed it as a contest: The top
220 buyers would dine with Mr. Trump at his golf club, while the top 25 would
attend a more intimate gathering with the president before dinner and go on a
tour of the White House. (In a quirk, the winners were selected based on the
average number of coins they held during the three weeks the contest was held,
rather than their total at the end of bidding.)
“We want to
be the leader in crypto, we want to be the leader in everything,” Mr. Trump
told the top 25 guests on the $TRUMP
coins leaderboard, according to a video shared with The Times. “It’s very
important to me.”
A business
entity tied to the Trumps sits on a large stash of the $TRUMP cryptocurrency
and collects fees every time the coins change hands. So far, the coin has
generated at least $320 million in fees, which the Trumps share with their
business partners, according to Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm.
Mr. Trump’s
oldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, largely stayed silent while the
$TRUMP memecoin contest played out, even though the company that they help run
directly benefits from the sales.
Speaking at
a government-sponsored business forum in Qatar, Donald Trump Jr. said this week
that the Trump family has decided it should not hesitate to find new ways to
profit, rejecting the business limits it voluntarily committed to during
President Trump’s first term.
“Even the
deals that were totally legit, it didn’t stop the insanity,” he said. “So, this
time around, we said, ‘Hey, we’re going to play by the rules, but we’re not
going to go so far as to stymie our business forever, lock ourselves in a
proverbial padded room.’ Because it almost doesn’t matter. They’re going to hit
you no matter what. So we’re just going to play the game.”
Many of the
guests have a direct stake in how cryptocurrencies are regulated in the United
States. They viewed the dinner as an opportunity to hear directly from Mr.
Trump and gain insight into how they might expand operations in the United
States after Biden-era rules led many of them to avoid investments in the
country.
Other
attendees were lower-profile entrepreneurs, influencers or Trump super fans,
willing to pay for the chance to meet the president.
“If I were
to get a selfie or a handshake or something or an autograph, that would be
priceless in and of itself for me,” said Vincent Deriu, a 27-year-old
consultant in New York who was ranked No. 165 on the $TRUMP leaderboard.
Among the
other guests a reporter for The Times saw at the check-in area were SuKyung Na,
who is chief operating officer at Hyperithm, a digital asset management company
based in Tokyo and Seoul, and Yan Liberman, a co-founder of Delphi Digital, a
Miami Beach firm that offers market intelligence for crypto investors.
The former
N.B.A. star Lamar Odom — now promoting his own memecoin, $ODOM — posted on
social media that he would be attending the event, and he appeared in other
guests’ photos from inside Mr. Trump’s club. “I’m just about to pass through
security and officially walk into the Trump Gala,” Mr. Odom wrote on social
media. “Honestly… I’m fired up.”
The dinner
list also included Nicholas Pinto, a 25-year-old entrepreneur from Cranford,
N.J., who first became rich by selling scooter wheels when he was 13 and has
since branched out to build a sprawling moneymaking social media presence and
invest in crypto.
“I am hoping
I will be the youngest winner there,” Mr. Pinto said, after he drove down from
New Jersey for the dinner. “And I want to see what President Trump’s plans are
for crypto. I want the inside scoop.”
As the event
wrapped up, a raffle was held for two Trump-branded watches, and guests posed
for a group photo with Trump hats on their heads, Mr. Pinto said.
The contest
was set up by a company called Fight, Fight, Fight, which was created in
January and is named after Mr. Trump’s response to the assassination attempt
against him in July.
Originally,
the Fight, Fight, Fight website, run by Bill Zanker, a longtime business
partner of the Trump family, promised “a Special V.I.P. White House tour” for
the top 25 coin holders. But references to the White House have been scrubbed
from the site, which now promises a “V.I.P. Tour” without specifying the
location.
Mr. Zanker
did not respond to a request for comment. Asked about the change, a senior
Trump administration official said the White House was not arranging a special
tour for the crypto investors and had “nothing” to do with the memecoin event.
But the
dinner organizers might still be taking guests on a tour of the White House’s
East Wing, which is open to the public, the official said.
A spokesman
for the Trump Organization also tried to distance the company from the event,
saying it was not involved. But the Trump family itself, through a corporate
entity called CIC Digital, takes a cut of the profits, and it also owns the
golf club where the dinner was held.
Reporting
was contributed by Dylan Freedman, David A. Fahrenthold and Elena Shao. Susan
C. Beachy contributed research.
David
Yaffe-Bellany writes about the crypto industry from New York. He can be reached
at davidyb@nytimes.com.
Eric Lipton
is a Times investigative reporter, who digs into a broad range of topics from
Pentagon spending to toxic chemicals.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário