A group of 220 cryptocurrency enthusiasts who won a dinner with President Trump by investing in his memecoin will gather tonight at his golf club in Virginia, an event that has sparked outrage from critics who call it an unethical sale of access to the presidency.
Mr. Trump and his business partners in the venture announced the event last month, calling it the “most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION” in the world. They framed it as a contest: The top 220 buyers of the coin would dine with the president at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., while the top 25 would join him at a more intimate cocktail reception and go on a tour of the White House the next day.
A leaderboard on the website of Mr. Trump’s memecoin, called $TRUMP, allowed crypto investors to see how much they needed to purchase to move up the rankings and win a spot.
In effect, Mr. Trump was offering access to himself in exchange for an investment in his cryptocurrency, which he started selling just days before his inauguration in January. Democrats in Congress and even some Republicans have assailed the contest as an inappropriate use of presidential power. A protest outside the golf club is scheduled for Thursday afternoon.
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 some based overseas, to funnel money to his family.
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.
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.
The Fight, Fight, Fight website, run by Bill Zanker, a longtime business partner of the Trump family, earlier promised “a Special V.I.P. White House tour” for the top 25 token holders. Now the website still promises a “V.I.P. Tour,” but there is no reference to the White House.
An administration official said there would be no official White House tour when asked about this change and that the White House had “nothing” to do with the event. But the administration official said the organizers might still be organizing a tour of the East Wing of the White House, which is available to the public.
A spokesman for the Trump Organization also attempted 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 the dinner is being held at a golf club the family owns.
Representative Sam Liccardo, Democrat of California, called the dinner an offense to the principles of honest government in the United States.
“No politician could have designed a scheme better suited to facilitate corruption from foreign individuals than the issuance of a digital asset that largely conceals the identity of its buyer,” said Mr. Liccardo, a member of the House Financial Services Committee who generally is supportive of the crypto industry.
Most of the dinner guests are not publicly known, identified only by short nicknames on the digital leaderboard.
But the final list included investors from Singapore, Australia and the United States, according to analysis by the crypto forensics firm Nansen and The New York Times. Some of those investors have said that they hope to use the dinner as an opportunity to press Mr. Trump’s on crypto policies.
“I will definitely not hesitate to share my perspective,” said Vincent Liu, who is attending the dinner as a representative of Kronos Research, a crypto firm founded in Taiwan. “It’s great to see the current direction that everything’s going.”
Several of the dinner guests told The Times in interviews that they expected the crowd to include a large number of crypto industry executives from around the world.
They see the event as an opportunity to listen to Mr. Trump talk about his crypto agenda and gain insight into how they might be able to expand operations in the United States or even enter the U.S. marketplace for the first time, after Biden-era rules led many of them to avoid investments here.
This week, Justin Sun, a crypto billionaire who runs the Tron platform, announced that he would also attend the dinner — and that he controlled the account listed as No. 1 on the leaderboard, with more than $20 million worth of coins. Mr. Sun, who was charged with fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023, was also a large investor in World Liberty Financial, another Trump family crypto venture.
The S.E.C. paused Mr. Sun’s fraud case not long after Mr. Trump took power in January. “Honored to support @POTUS and grateful for the invitation,” Mr. Sun wrote on social media this week.
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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