President Donald Trump is set to attend an exclusive dinner Thursday night with the top investors in his personalized meme coin—a gathering that Democrats are calling a blatant conflict of interest and a troubling example of how Trump is leveraging his presidency for private financial gain.
More than 200 crypto investors are expected to be at Trump’s private golf club in northern Virginia for the event, which Trump and business partners have described as the “most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION” in the world. The venture was framed as a contest, with the top 220 buyers of Trump’s meme coin scoring a seat at a private dinner with the President at the Trump National Golf Club. The top 25 buyers were promised additional perks, including a separate a cocktail reception.
On average, guests spent over $1.7 million a seat to attend the dinner, according to an analysis by the blockchain analytics company Nansen, per NBC News. The top seven winners each spent more than $10 million.
Investors could track via a leaderboard how much of Trump’s meme coin, called $TRUMP, they needed to purchase to move up the rankings. Ethics watchdogs have said that Trump was effectively offering access to himself in exchange for an investment in his cryptocurrency, which he started selling just days before his inauguration in January. Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress have pointed to the event as the clearest example yet of how the Trump family’s crypto empire is blurring the lines between public office, private enrichment, and untraceable foreign money.
“Donald Trump’s dinner is an orgy of corruption,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts told reporters at a press conference hosted by Democrats ahead of the dinner. “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.”
Wyoming Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Republican and longtime advocate for digital assets, separately expressed reservations of the event: “This is my President we’re talking about, but I am willing to say that this gives me pause.”
While meme coins are often treated as jokes, with no real utility, Trump’s meme coins have become a way for wealthy individuals to gain access to Trump and funnel money to his family. So far, Trump’s coin has generated at least $320 million in fees, according to Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm.
Most of the guests attending the private dinner are not publicly known, and the White House has not said whether it will publicly disclose the guest list. When asked about the dinner on Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “The president is attending it in his personal time. It is not a White House dinner.”
She rejected the ethical concerns about how the guests to the dinner were selected, reiterating that his assets are held in a blind trust and managed by his children. “It’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this President is profiting off of the presidency,” Leavitt said. “This President was incredibly successful before giving it all up to serve our country publicly. Not only has he lost wealth, but he also almost lost his life. He has sacrificed a lot to be here.”
Trump and his family have embraced cryptocurrencies in his second term. He’s said he wants to make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet and bitcoin superpower of the world,” promising favorable regulation of the industry. In March, he held a crypto summit at the White House with prominent figures in the industry and signed an executive order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Digital Asset Stockpile.
The Trump family also holds about a 60% stake in World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture that has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue since January. The venture got a boost earlier this month when World Liberty announced it was being used by an investment firm in the United Arab Emirates for its $2 billion investment in Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. Trump’s involvement in the crypto industry comes just as Congress prepares to vote on stablecoin legislation.
Warren on Thursday called on Congress to amend that legislation, called the GENIUS Act, to bar any President from profiting off stablecoin ventures. Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has also introduced legislation that would ban sitting Presidents from profiting off meme coins while in office.
“Just because the corruption is playing out in public where everybody can see, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t rampant, rapacious corruption,” Murphy said at the Democrats’ press conference hours before the dinner, which he described as “maybe the most corrupt, of all of the corruption.”
Those who have publicly shared that they plan to attend the dinner include crypto billionaire Justin Sun, the founder of the Tron blockchain, who says he is the top holder of Trump’s memecoin. Sun was charged with fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023, but regulators paused his fraud case not long after Trump took power.
On Thursday morning, Rep. Maxine Waters of California and other senior Democrats introduced a bill titled the “Stop The Rug Pulls by Unethical Members and Presidents Act,” aiming to bar all elected officials from launching or endorsing crypto products. “Through his crypto businesses, Trump has turned the office of the presidency into a personal money-making machine,” Waters said at a recent House hearing.
