Early Monday morning, the leader of the free world had a message to convey. Not about the economic turmoil from tariffs, any one of the skirmishes playing out abroad, or a surprise shake-up in his White House staff. Instead, President Donald Trump turned to Truth Social to post about something called the “$TRUMP GALA DINNER,” with a link to gettrumpmemes.com.
A visit to the website paints a slightly fuller picture: Buy as many tokens as you can of Trump’s personal cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, and you could be invited to a private event later this month at the Trump National Golf Club outside Washington, D.C. There, you will get the unique opportunity to meet with the president and “learn about the future of Crypto.” The gala looks very much like a thinly veiled gambit to pump up the price of $TRUMP, a so-called memecoin that is mostly owned by Trump-backed entities. Funnel the greatest amount of money to the president of the United States, and you could win some face time with the big man himself.
In 2021, Trump called bitcoin a “scam.” Now he seems to understand exactly what crypto can do for him personally: namely, make Trump and his family very, very rich. The $TRUMP gala is one part of a constellation of Trump-affiliated crypto efforts that includes Trump Digital Trading Card NFTs, a crypto company called World Liberty Financial, and a bitcoin-mining firm. According to an analysis by Bloomberg, the Trump family has already banked nearly $1 billion from these projects. Long before he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower a decade ago, Trump’s public image was rooted in his business prowess. But compared with his real-estate projects or The Apprentice, crypto is already turning into his most successful venture yet.
Trump perhaps wouldn’t be president at all if it wasn’t for crypto. During the 2024 campaign, the industry was among his campaign’s biggest donors. That money flowed in from both crypto corporations and individual donors, such as the bitcoin billionaires Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. (The identical twins gave $1 million each in bitcoin to the Trump campaign, but had to be refunded because they exceeded the legal donation limit.) In exchange, Trump promised the imperiled industry a fresh start after four years of a Biden-sanctioned crypto crackdown. Last summer, as the keynote speaker at the annual bitcoin conference, Trump promised that if elected, he would make America the “crypto capital of the planet.” The crypto industry is now getting its money’s worth. Consider the crypto firm Ripple, which spent four years squaring off against Biden’s regulators in federal courtrooms and donated $4.9 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Yesterday, the new administration dropped the government’s case, as the White House has effectively stopped enforcing crypto rules.
Trump is still tapping crypto magnates for money. On Monday, he attended a super PAC’s “Crypto & AI Innovators” fundraiser, for which donors shelled out $1.5 million to get in the door. But for Trump, crypto has quickly become about more than soliciting campaign donations and rewarding supporters. In September, Trump announced the launch of World Liberty Financial, a decentralized-finance company to be managed by his sons Eric and Don Jr. and a couple of young entrepreneurs. (One previously ran a company called Date Hotter Girls, while the other is the son of Steve Witkoff, a longtime Trump ally serving as special envoy to the Middle East.) Then, in January, just before Inauguration Day, he launched $TRUMP. Like all memecoins, it has no underlying business fundamentals or links to real-world assets—the point is to just quickly capitalize on a viral trend, conjuring value out of practically nothing. This proved extremely lucrative almost immediately: $TRUMP initially spiked in value before crashing back down, at one point accounting for almost 90 percent of the president’s net worth. (There’s also an official $MELANIA coin, if that’s more your thing.)
With crypto, Trump has found an unnervingly effective way to transmute the clout and power of the nation’s highest office into cold, hard cash. Last week, World Liberty Financial announced that its cryptocurrency, USD1, would facilitate an Abu Dhabi investment firm’s $2 billion stake in the crypto exchange Binance. Eric and Don Jr. are also on the crypto press circuit, with plans to speak at the 2025 bitcoin conference later this month. Some of Trump’s decisions as president, such as creating a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,” may also function to inflate his crypto riches, in the sense that a rising tide lifts all boats; promoting crypto as part of the national interest can only support the idea that these coins are worth buying into.
Crypto is a conduit for the self-interest that has defined Trump’s entire political career—an M.O. that has consistently blurred the boundary between public and private, country and party. For the most part, Trump has been especially good to those who line his pockets, rewarding them with all kinds of preferential treatment.
During his first term, Trump enriched himself the old-fashioned way—by way of merchandising deals and real-estate investments across the globe. But with crypto, all of that has ratcheted up in Trump’s second term. In crypto, money is fast, loose, and digitally native—properties that have made his personal dealings in the industry even more galling, and potentially more vulnerable to outside sway. Someone looking to gain access to Trump might have once had to pay thousands of dollars a night for a room at Mar-a-Lago for a chance encounter with the president on the golf course. Now the door is open for influence from almost anyone in the world with an internet connection.
The White House insists that there is nothing to see here. “His assets are in a trust managed by his children, and there are no conflicts of interest,” Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in an emailed statement. Keeping that wealth in a trust may do very little to sever the connection between Trump and his riches, though, depending on the exact conditions of the arrangement. Even when Eric and Don Jr. serve as a buffer, the money stays in the family.
Crypto’s anonymous nature poses unique challenges in understanding exactly what is happening—transactions on a blockchain are typically posted using long strings of numbers known as addresses, rather than verified by legal name. By all accounts, to interact with $TRUMP is to funnel money directly into the president’s pockets, but the campaign-finance laws that caused the Winklevosses’ exorbitant donations to be refunded don’t apply here. Nothing is stopping, say, agents of foreign powers, or tech billionaires looking for favorable tariff treatment, from using $TRUMP to gain access to the highest echelons of government. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are starting to get it: Yesterday, three GOP senators joined Democrats to block a major crypto bill that would serve to benefit World Liberty Financial.
Ironically, Trump’s embrace of crypto is pumping money into the industry while simultaneously damaging it. Since the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried in 2022, the image of crypto as a haven for scams and hackers has loomed large. At a moment when the crypto industry is trying to claw its way back to respectability and legitimization, Trump has taken every opportunity to cement it in the minds of the Americans as nothing more than a vehicle for channeling money directly to him. In crypto, “there are many people who have ethics, and have been working for years to build the system because they believe what they are doing is in the public interest,” Angela Walch, a crypto expert and former law professor, told me. “And what this does is it makes all the messaging that has come from extreme crypto critics about, ‘It’s only a tool for grift,’ and makes it look like that.”
By hitching their wagon to Trump, the industry’s leaders have unleashed a force they can’t control. The moment the president cashed in on crypto, the calculus shifted. Like the hot dogs at Costco, “being the president” is the loss leader; crypto pays the bills.
