The Dictatorship
As family crypto schemes falter, Trump meets again with meme coin investors
For the second time in a year, President Donald Trump met with cryptocurrency investors who have poured money into his beleaguered and brazenly unethical meme coin scheme.
At an event on Saturday marketed as the “most exclusive crypto and business conference in the world,” Trump addressed the 297 largest investors in his self-enriching, eponymous digital currency at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. That the president squeezed in some crypto-related hype ahead of his appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that night shows the extent to which Trump has prioritized money-making crypto ventures in his second term.
Ahead of Saturday’s conference, Ars Technica reported on the issues swirling around Trump’s meme coin, including suspicions of insider trading and a 93% drop in value from last year that’s led to billions of dollars in investor losses.
Saturday’s event featured notable Trump supporters, such as scandal-plagued boxer Mike Tyson and scandal-plagued motivational speaker Tony RobbinsThe Wall Street Journal noted.
The White House told the Journal Trump attended the event at his estate in “his personal capacity.” While pointing to a past White House statement that “neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest,” the Journal reported Trump discussed political matters with this exclusive audience of attendees:
In a wide-ranging address from his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump touched on everything from the Iran war and his crypto friendly policies to the future of artificial intelligence and a recent rally in the shares of Intel, the chip maker in which the U.S. government invested.
The Journal said attendees received “commemorative items such as Trump fragrances, posters, trading cards and watches.” The tradeoff for investors seemed to be that they throw down some cash for some almost worthless crypto ($TRUMP was trading at $2.59 during the event, according to the Journal), and in return they gain access to the president and perhaps some insight into his destructive war with Iran or his thinking about crypto and artificial intelligence policies. And trading cards and posters, like you would find inside a cereal box.
When Trump hosted a similar event last May for investors in his meme coin, ethics activist Noah Bookbinder told MS NOW the event took Trump’s efforts to profit off the presidency to a “whole new level.” And yet, as Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., noted in a recent Politico interviewTrump’s cryptocurrency investments seem to have been normalized to much of the American public.
It’s worth considering how things might have played out differently if the roles had been reversed and a Democratic president were engaging in this kind of shameless self-enrichment. Imagine if Barack Obama, while president, had hosted a ritzy gala for people who had personally handed him duffle bags of cash to invest in what he was billing as his “magic bean” business. “Barry’s Bean Scheme” would have been the top story on Fox News and other conservative outlets for months, perhaps years on end.
Yet there’s no such outrage on the right over Trump’s second gala in a year to flog his crypto venture.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.