Washington – President Donald Trump rewarded the main investors in one of his cryptocurrency projects with an elegant dinner on Thursday night, an event that showed the rise of an emerging financial industry, and also the will of the president to mix a public office with personal profits.
About 220 of the largest investors in the $ Trump The same corner They were invited to Luxury Golf Club of Trump in northern Virginia, where they had dinner at Filet Mignon and Halibut. According to the publications of the participants in social networks, Trump spoke for about half an hour before dancing with the song “YMCA”.
Although the White House insisted that Trump would attend the event “in his personal time”, stayed behind a lectern with the presidential seal while promoting an industry that generated profits for his family business.
After feeling unfairly attacked under President Joe Biden, the cryptographic industry has quickly become a powerful political force, donating great sums to help Trump and friendly legislators. The United States Senate is advanced Pro-crypto key legislation while Bitcoin prices shoot.
However, even some pro-trump cryptocurrencies are concerned that the president’s personal participation may be undermining their efforts to establish credibility and stability for the industry.
“It is unpleasant and an unnecessary distraction,” said Nic Carter, a Trump supporter and a partner of the Castle Island Ventures cryptographic investment firm, who said the president is “hugging us to death” with his private cryptography businesses. “We would prefer that he passes common sense legislation and leaves it like this.”
As the president uses cryptography as a platform to earn money for his brand in an unprecedented way, he is also creating an opportunity for potentially bleak buyers to use the anonymity of the Internet to buy access to the president. The lack of transparency was evident in a meeting board at dinner, where the participants signed a classification of the main investors. Some used their real names; Others used pseudonyms.
The media at dinner was not allowed, and the president was at his golf club for only an hour. The protesters gathered outside the club holding signals that said “stop cryptographic corruption” and “without corrupt dumb.”
Trump said the event was “good, very good” when he returned to the White House.
Three days before Trump assumed the position on January 20, he announced the creation of the $ Trump Meme currency in the elegant cryptography cryptography maintained by the White House Street. He described it as a way for his followers to “have fun.”
Memes coins are the black sheep of the cryptographic sector. They are often created as a joke, without a real utility and prone to changes in extremely wild prices that tend to enrich a small group of experts at the expense of less sophisticated investors.
However, the president’s meme coin is different and has a clear utility: access to Trump. In addition to Thursday’s dinner, the 25 best were invited to a private reception with the president, with the first four with cryptographic watches and the Trump brand of $ 100,000.
The Trump meme currency saw an initial increase in value, followed by a strong fall. Its creators, which include an entity controlled by the Trump organizationThey have earned hundreds of millions of dollars by collection of rates in operations.
First woman Melania Trump He has his own meme currency, and Trump’s children, Eric and Don Jr., who run the Trump organization while their father is president, announced that they are associating with an existing company to create a cryptographic mining company.
The Trump family also has a 60% participation in World Liberty FinancialA cryptographic project that provides another way where investors are buying and enriching the president’s relatives. World Liberty has launched its own stablecoin, USD1. The project recently received when World Liberty announced that an investment fund in the United Arab Emirates would use $ 2 billion in USD1 to buy a participation in Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.
Stablecoins has values linked to fixed assets such as the US dollar. The emitters benefit when collecting interest on treasure bonds and other assets used to support the stable.
Crypto is now one of the most important sources of the wealth of the Trump family.
“He is becoming a seller in chief,” said James Thurber, a professor at the American University, emeritus who has studied and taught for a long time about corruption worldwide. “It allows great conflicts of interest.”
“I am a big fan of cryptography,” Trump told journalists aboard Air Force One during the past week Trip to the Middle East. “I have been that from the beginning, from the campaign.”
That was not always true. During his first term, Trump published in July 2019 that cryptocurrencies were “no money” and had value that was “very volatile and based on thin air.”
“Unregulated cryptographic assets can facilitate illegal behavior, including drug trafficking,” he added then. Even after leaving office in 2021, Trump told Fox Business Network that Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency in the world, “looks like a scam.”
Trump began to change during a cryptographic event at his Mar-A-Lago Club in Florida in May 2024, receiving guarantees that industry sponsors would generously spend to re-relate it. Another important milestone came last June, when Trump attended a collection of high dollar funds in the house of San Francisco de SACKS OF DAVID.
Those close to Trump, including their children and their billionaire ELON ALMIZCLEHe helped further boost his hug to the industry. Sacks is now the Cryptographic Tsar of the Trump administration, and many members of the Cabinet, including the Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth – We have long been the enthusiastic cryptographic reinforcements.
“I have no faith in the dollar”, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy Said in 2023 interview. “I am optimistic in Bitcoin.”
Many main cryptographic sponsors were naturally distrustful of traditional politics, but gravitated to Trump last year. They erred on how the Biden Commission and the Biden Securities Commission aggressively brought civil lawsuits against several important cryptographic companies.
Since Trump assumed the position, many of these cases have been withdrawn or detained, including one that claims that Justin Sun, a cryptographic businessman born in China and his company participated in the manipulation of the market and Pagured celebrities For unleashed promotions.
Sun, who once paid $ 6.2 million for a work of art that involved a banana attached to a wall and then ate the banana, helped the Trump start World Liberty Financial with an early investment of $ 75 million.
The sun has revealed In social networks, he is the largest holder of the $ Trump Meme coins and attends Thursday’s dinner.
“I am excited to connect with everyone, speak cryptographic and discuss the future of our industry,” Sun said in advance.
He published a Trump video entering private reception.
“Can you see the helicopter?” Trump said.
“Yes! Super great,” said Sun.
Trump has signed executive orders that promote the industry, including calls to create a Government Bitcoin Reserve. In March, Trump summoned the first Cryptocurrency Summit In the White House.
But some of the most important names in the industry, often shameless and open, have mainly kept Mom in the MEMES coins and other Trump projects.
“It’s not my place to really comment on President Trump’s activity,” said CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, in a recent public event.
Meanwhile, a superior legislative priority for cryptomatists, a bill that clarifies how digital assets will be regulated, has advanced in the Senate. But some Democrats have tried to stop another pro-Crypto legislation on the president’s personal treatment, and see dinner as a particularly atrocious case.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said the meeting was “in force, putting a” sale “sign in the White House.”
“He’s auctioning access,” Blumenthal said in a call from Thursday’s press.
The White House Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the president is attending “in his personal time.” The White House has also said that it has nothing to do with Trump’s memes coin.
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Associated Press’s writer Chris Megerian in Washington contributed to this story.
