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As though launching his own meme coin days before the inauguration wasn’t potentially corrupt enough, three months later, President Donald Trump had his crypto team announce a special dinner party for the 220 top holders of $TRUMP, calling it the “most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the World.” It temporarily juiced the value of the token by 60 percent as investors spent millions to secure their seats — all in a day’s work for a head of state who has gone above and beyond to cash in on his office, with his family’s fortune ballooning by almost $3 billion thanks to their various crypto plays.
Attendees of the Thursday night banquet at Trump National Golf Club outside Washington, D.C., paid an average of $1 million to get in the room, spending close to $400 million in total. But while the 25 biggest $TRUMP whales were treated to a more exclusive reception with the president, it seems the rest forked over that cash for little more than one another’s company, a reportedly sub-par meal, and generic remarks from Trump, who didn’t even stick around to meet anyone before catching a golf cart back to his helicopter. It had to be something of a disappointment for guests, including foreign executives, who went with the idea of swaying Trump on crypto issues and regulation.
“It was the worst food I’ve ever had at a Trump golf course,” Nicholas Pinto, a business influencer who poured around $300,000 into Trump’s coin, told Wired of the entree, a surf-and-turf dish that included halibut and filet mignon. Speaking to Fortune, he criticized the latter as a “Walmart steak.” Pictures of the plates suggested that the dinner was barely up to airline standards — though it’s not as if you can expect much better from the kitchen at the country club of a man who also put his name on what was once suggested to be “the worst restaurant in America.” (Even a Thanksgiving reservation at Mar-a-Lago gets you what appears to be the equivalent of a frozen TV dinner.)
Among those who did enjoy some extra perks was Justin Sun, the Chinese-born entrepreneur and crypto billionaire who had a Securities and Exchange Commission civil fraud suit against him and his companies frozen after he invested $75 million into $WLFI, the digital token of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial exchange. Sun claims to be the largest holder of $TRUMP, and appears to have a stake worth around $19 million; he and three other top backers, as well as two raffle winners, received $100,000 gold Trump watches, though Trump did not bother to bestow these gifts himself. Still, Sun showed his off on X and sang the president’s praises in an interview with CoinDesk, dismissing the idea that the $TRUMP offering and dinner constituted a form of bribery. “All the haters need to really pay attention,” he said. “There are positive things happening in the industry.”
Protesters outside the club, including Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, plainly disagreed, waving signs that read “USA IS NOT FOR SALE” and “DEMOCRACY NOT KLEPTOCRACY.” They booed and heckled at least one investor guest, Lamar Odom, former NBA player and ex-husband of Khloé Kardashian, as seen in a video he shared on his X account. Some activists demanded that the list of attendees — most of them are not known — be made public. On Thursday afternoon, ahead of the dinner, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was pressed on this very concern, with a reporter saying that these individuals were paying for access to the president. Leavitt insisted that Trump was stopping by the club “in his personal time.” Naturally, however, he traveled by Marine One, a presidential aircraft, and spoke at a lectern with the presidential seal, in front of American flags. “They were going after everybody,” Trump said of the Biden administration’s efforts to root out fraud in the crypto industry, which led to its most prominent figures donating millions to elect Trump last year. “There is a lot of sense in crypto,” he told his audience.
Anticipation for the event seemed to push $TRUMP higher early on Thursday, to nearly $16, but as the dinner got underway, it started to slide, dipping under $13 by Friday afternoon. Trump-owned companies own 800 million of the coins — almost half of the total supply — theoretically worth around $10 billion at the current price. The inherent volatility of the vibes-based token is hardly an issue for the Trump family, who along with other insiders have collected at least $300 million in transaction fees alone: they profit whenever the coin is traded.
The same can’t be said for hundreds of thousands of retail investors who wanted in on the MAGA money machine from the jump, and promptly lost a combined $2 billion by February as the $TRUMP coin initially soared and then crashed back to earth. It would appear that between those gambling a few bucks on this venture and the would-be tycoons buying enough to land an invite to a lousy party, pretty much everybody is going to come away looking like a sucker.
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