President Trump gathered Thursday evening at his Virginia golf club with the highest-paying customers of his personal cryptocurrency, promising that he would promote the crypto industry from the White House as protesters outside condemned the event as a historic corruption of the presidency.
The gala dinner held at the Trump National Golf Club in suburban Washington, where Mr. Trump flew from the White House on a military helicopter, turned into an extraordinary spectacle as hundreds of guests arrived, many having flown to the United States from overseas.
At the club’s entrance, the guests were greeted by dozens of protesters chanting “shame, shame, shame.”
It was a spectacle that could only have happened in the era of Donald J. Trump. Several of the dinner guests, in interviews with The New York Times, said that they attended the event with the explicit intent of influencing Mr. Trump and U.S. financial regulations.
“The past administration made your lives miserable,” Mr. Trump told the dinner guests, referring to the Biden administration’s enforcement actions against cryptocurrency companies.
The gala attendees made whooping noises while Mr. Trump spoke, and applauded as the president declared: “They were going after everybody. It was a disgrace frankly,” according to a video provided to The Times by a dinner guest.
Mr. Trump promised to change everything for crypto. “There is a lot of sense in crypto. A lot of common sense in crypto. And we’re honored to be working on helping everybody here.”
Mr. Trump and his business partners organized the dinner to promote sales of his $TRUMP token, a memecoin launched just days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration. A memecoin is a type of cryptocurrency tied to an online joke or mascot; it typically has no function beyond speculation. But Mr. Trump’s coins have become a vehicle for investors, including many based overseas, to funnel money to his family.
The president’s business partners called the dinner the world’s “most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION” and posted a leaderboard online that allowed crypto investors to calculate how many $TRUMP coins they would have to buy to earn one of the approximately 220 seats.
The start of Mr. Trump’s second term has been punctuated with more than a dozen of these lucrative transactions for his family and partners: real estate deals from Qatar to Serbia that involve foreign governments, a new banklike crypto venture that has pulled in $2 billion from the government of the United Arab Emirates, a golf tournament at his Miami club sponsored by a Saudi-funded venture.
But none of these profit-seeking pitches has been more explicit than the memecoin dinner. The event was unlike anything in recent American history — not a campaign fund-raiser but a gathering arranged by the president’s business partners to directly enrich the first family.
As guests were flowing into the club, protesters held signs with slogans like “Stop Crypto Corruption,” “Release the guest list” and “No Kings.”
“This is the crypto corruption club,” Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, yelled at the entrance to Mr. Trump’s golf course, speaking so loudly that he had to stop after he lost his voice.
“This is like the Mount Everest of corruption,” Mr. Merkley said.
At a news conference on Thursday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, rejected any suggestion that Mr. Trump was acting inappropriately by hosting the dinner.
“It’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency,” she said before Mr. Trump headed to the club. “This president was incredibly successful before giving it all up to serve our country publicly.”
Outside the club, men in tuxedos began gathering by a sign-in table at 5 p.m., collecting wristbands and raffle tickets as they made their way inside to escape the rain. Some of the guests flashed foreign passports as a means of identification.
The dinner menu featured filet mignon and pan-seared halibut, as well as a “Trump organic field green salad.” Mr. Trump spoke from a lectern adorned with the presidential seal and with American flags arrayed behind him.
Perhaps the best known crypto investor at the dinner was Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire who runs the crypto platform Tron. He spent more than $40 million on $TRUMP coins, earning himself the top spot on the leaderboard.
Wearing a black bow tie and accompanied by an assistant who held an umbrella over his head, Mr. Sun was among the first guests to arrive. In a brief interview at the club, he told The Times that the dinner would be his first meeting with Mr. Trump.
“I’m very excited to meet him and discuss about crypto’s future,” Mr. Sun said.
Sangrok Oh, a Korean crypto executive, arrived at the dinner with a collection of red baseball caps emblazoned with the words “Make Crypto Great Again” that he planned to hand out at the event. He said he had flown all the way from Seoul to attend the dinner.
“It’s kind of a fund-raiser” for Mr. Trump, Mr. Oh said in an interview at his hotel in suburban Virginia. “And he’ll always be good to his sponsors.”
Others guests included Vincent Liu, the chief investment officer at Kronos Research, a crypto firm founded in Taiwan. Kronos profits by doing high-frequency trading on crypto platforms across the world — except in the United States.
But with a nod from Mr. Trump and his regulators, Mr. Liu wants to enter the U.S. market. His firm bought enough of the $TRUMP coins to ensure he had a seat at the dinner — with the hope he might get Mr. Trump’s ear.
“I will definitely not hesitate to share my perspective,” Mr. Liu said. “It’s great to see the current direction that everything’s going.”
Mr. Trump launched the memecoin just days before his inauguration, setting off a flurry of trading. Initially, the coin’s price skyrocketed, before it eventually crashed, costing investors billions of dollars.
The dinner was designed to fuel more sales. The organizers framed it as a contest: The top 220 buyers would dine with Mr. Trump at his golf club, while the top 25 would attend a more intimate gathering with the president before dinner and go on a tour of the White House. (In a quirk, the winners were selected based on the average number of coins they held during the three weeks the contest was held, rather than their total at the end of bidding.)
A business entity tied to the Trumps sits on a large stash of the $TRUMP cryptocurrency and collects fees every time the coins change hands. So far, the coin has generated at least $320 million in fees, which the Trumps share with their business partners, according to Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm.
Mr. Trump’s oldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, largely stayed silent while the $TRUMP memecoin contest played out, even though the company that they help run directly benefits from the sales.
Speaking at a government-sponsored business forum in Qatar, Donald Trump Jr. said this week that the Trump family has decided it should not hesitate to find new ways to profit, rejecting the business limits it voluntarily committed to during President Trump’s first term.
“Even the deals that were totally legit, it didn’t stop the insanity,” he said. “So, this time around, we said, ‘Hey, we’re going to play by the rules, but we’re not going to go so far as to stymie our business forever, lock ourselves in a proverbial padded room.’ Because it almost doesn’t matter. They’re going to hit you no matter what. So we’re just going to play the game.”
Many of the guests have a direct stake in how cryptocurrencies are regulated in the United States. They viewed the dinner as an opportunity to hear directly from Mr. Trump and gain insight into how they might expand operations in the United States after Biden-era rules led many of them to avoid investments in the country.
Other attendees were lower-profile entrepreneurs, influencers or Trump super fans, willing to pay for the chance to meet the president.
“If I were to get a selfie or a handshake or something or an autograph, that would be priceless in and of itself for me,” said Vincent Deriu, a 27-year-old consultant who was ranked No. 165 on the $TRUMP leaderboard.
Among the guests a reporter for The Times saw at the check-in area included SuKyung Na, who is chief operating officer at Hyperithm, a digital asset management company based in Tokyo and Seoul, and Yan Liberman, a co-founder of Delphi Digital, a Miami Beach firm that offers market intelligence for crypto investors.
The dinner list also included Nicholas Pinto, a 25-year-old entrepreneur from Cranford, N.J., who first became rich by selling scooter wheels when he was 13 and has since branched out to build a sprawling moneymaking social media presence and invest in crypto.
“I am hoping I will be the youngest winner there,” Mr. Pinto said, after he drove down from New Jersey for the dinner. “And I want to see what President Trump’s plans are for crypto. I want the inside scoop.”
As the event wrapped up, a raffle was held for two Trump branded watches among the guests and they then posed for a photo as a group with Trump hats on their heads, Mr. Pinto said.
The contest was set up by a company called Fight, Fight, Fight, which was created in January and is named after Mr. Trump’s response to the assassination attempt against him in July.
Originally, the Fight, Fight, Fight website, run by Bill Zanker, a longtime business partner of the Trump family, promised “a Special V.I.P. White House tour” for the top 25 coin holders. But references to the White House have been scrubbed from the site, which now promises a “V.I.P. Tour” without specifying the location.
Mr. Zanker did not respond to a request for comment. Asked about the change, a senior Trump administration official said the White House was not arranging a special tour for the crypto investors and had “nothing” to do with the memecoin event.
But the dinner organizers might still be taking guests on a tour of the White House’s East Wing, which is open to the public, the official said.
A spokesman for the Trump Organization also tried to distance the company from the event, saying it was not involved. But the Trump family itself, through a corporate entity called CIC Digital, takes a cut of the profits and it owns the golf club where the dinner was held.
Reporting was contributed by Dylan Freedman, David A. Fahrenthold and Elena Shao. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
David Yaffe-Bellany writes about the crypto industry from New York. He can be reached at [email protected].
Eric Lipton is a Times investigative reporter, who digs into a broad range of topics from Pentagon spending to toxic chemicals.
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