{"id":29684,"date":"2025-05-25T20:08:45","date_gmt":"2025-05-25T20:08:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/protestors-accuse-trump-of-corruption-as-he-hosts-crypto-dinner\/"},"modified":"2025-05-25T20:08:45","modified_gmt":"2025-05-25T20:08:45","slug":"protestors-accuse-trump-of-corruption-as-he-hosts-crypto-dinner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/protestors-accuse-trump-of-corruption-as-he-hosts-crypto-dinner\/","title":{"rendered":"Protestors accuse Trump of corruption as he hosts crypto dinner"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Lily Jamali<\/span><\/p>\n
Reporting from<\/svg>San Francisco<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\"GettyGetty Images<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
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US President Donald Trump has hosted top purchasers of the cryptocurrency that bears his name at a gala dinner, in an event that protesters and his Democrat opponents branded as “corrupt”.<\/p>\n

$TRUMP was launched shortly before his inauguration in January, initially rocketing in value before falling sharply afterwards.<\/p>\n

“It’s fundamentally corrupt – a way to buy access to the President,” Democrat senator Chris Murphy wrote on X.<\/p>\n

Protesters gathered outside the event on Thursday night, which was held at a golf course near Washington DC, some carrying signs reading “stop crypto corruption” and “no kings.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The White House has rejected the accusations, and in a video of the dinner posted on social media, Trump is seen saying “I always put the country way ahead of the business.”<\/p>\n

“The Biden administration persecuted crypto innovators and we’re bringing them back into the USA where they belong,” Trump is also recorded as saying.<\/p>\n

The event took place as Bitcoin – the leading cryptocurrency – was hitting a fresh record high price in dollar terms of almost $112,000 (\u00a383,000) per coin, before falling back slightly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

What is $TRUMP?<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
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$TRUMP is what is known as a meme coin – a type of cryptocurrency inspired by internet memes or viral online trends. <\/p>\n

Its price peaked at $75 in January before plummeting to less than $8 in April – it was trading at around $12.50 at the time of writing.<\/p>\n

“This is something that doesn’t have obvious utility. It’s not being used for payments. It’s not being used as a store of value,” said Rob Hadick, General Partner of Dragonfly, a crypto venture fund.<\/p>\n

The dinner was advertised on the website gettrumpmemes.com as “the most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the World.”<\/p>\n

The top 220 purchasers of the meme coin, viewable on a leaderboard<\/a>, received invitations to the “black-tie optional” event.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The top investor in the $TRUMP meme coin is billionaire crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun who was charged with fraud and market manipulation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission during the Biden administration.<\/p>\n

In February, the Trump administration paused the case.<\/p>\n

Sun said<\/a> this week on the social media platform X that he planned to attend the dinner, calling himself Trump’s “TOP fan!”<\/p>\n

Sun then made a series of posts on Thursday night on X, including one<\/a> that said it was an “honour” to attend the dinner.<\/p>\n

Earlier in the day, Democrat senators held a press conference to denounce the event and to call for disclosure of who would be attending.<\/p>\n

Calling the dinner “an orgy of corruption,” Senator Elizabeth Warren slammed Trump for “using the presidency of the United States to make himself richer through crypto.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

From crypto critic to investor<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
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Trump’s views on cryptocurrency have undergone radical change in recent years.<\/p>\n

In 2021, he called Bitcoin a “scam.”<\/p>\n

Now, he’s not just in charge of regulating cryptocurrencies in the US – he and his family are active industry participants.<\/p>\n

In addition to the meme coin, the Trump family also holds a majority stake in the crypto exchange World Liberty Financial, which was launched just prior to the election.<\/p>\n

Trump expressed his desire to be the nation’s first “Crypto President” while campaigning for his second term, and was a major beneficiary of campaign contributions from the crypto industry in the 2024 election.<\/p>\n

According to a report<\/a> by the group State Democracy Defenders Action, Trump’s investments in crypto have helped boost his net worth by as much as $2.9bn.<\/p>\n

“As a stakeholder in crypto assets, President Trump will likely profit from the very policies he is pursuing,” the report states.<\/p>\n

Three days into his term, Trump issued an executive order to establish a regulatory framework that promotes the growth of digital currencies.<\/p>\n

A Trump administration official told the BBC that the meme coin has nothing to do with the White House.<\/p>\n

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly pushed back on concerns about potential conflicts.<\/p>\n

“The President is working to secure GOOD deals for the American people, not for himself,” Kelly said in a statement. <\/p>\n

But one former financial regulator likened the meme coin to gambling.<\/p>\n

“It’s like selling membership cards for his personal fan club which are then traded,” said Timothy Massad, Director of the Digital Asset Policy Project at Harvard. <\/p>\n

“They have no value. But people speculate on the price and those purchases and that trading enriches him.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) speaks on Day 3 of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) at the United Center, in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., August 21, 2024. REUTERS\/Mike Segar<\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
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At a Senate committee hearing this week, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy grilled<\/a> Secretary of State Marco Rubio about the lack of transparency regarding who would attend Thursday night’s dinner.<\/p>\n

Murphy cited reports that many of the attendees at the invite-only event were expected to be foreigners.<\/p>\n

“There’s clearly a way around the State Department for foreign individuals of significant influence and wealth to be able to directly lobby the president of the United States,” he said.<\/p>\n

“I don’t have any concern that the president having dinner with someone is going to contravene the security of the United States,” Rubio responded, adding that he was unaware of the dinner.<\/p>\n

Additional reporting by Graham Fraser<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Lily Jamali Reporting fromSan Francisco Getty Images US President Donald Trump has hosted top purchasers of the cryptocurrency that bears his name at a gala dinner, in an event that protesters and his Democrat opponents branded as “corrupt”. $TRUMP was launched shortly before his inauguration in January, initially rocketing in value before falling sharply afterwards. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29685,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[9095,891,7292,5789,2369,8809,494],"class_list":["post-29684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech","tag-accuse","tag-corruption","tag-crypto","tag-dinner","tag-hosts","tag-protestors","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29684"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29686,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29684\/revisions\/29686"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}