Trump Is Selling His Crypto Meme Coin to Anonymous Donors in a Pay-to-Play Scheme

Apr 25, 2025

Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency “meme coin” serves as a way for favor-seekers to enrich him while remaining anonymous to the public. But now Trump is openly promoting his meme coin as a way to buy personal access to the president.

The Washington Post reports:

Buyers have poured tens of millions of dollars into President Donald Trump’s meme coin since his team advertised Wednesday that top purchasers could join Trump for an “intimate private dinner” next month, a Washington Post analysis found.
The holders of 27 crypto wallets have each acquired more than 100,000 $TRUMP coins, stakes worth about a million dollars each, since noon on Wednesday, when the team announced that the 220 top coin holders would be rewarded with a “night to remember” on May 22 at the president’s Trump National Golf Club outside Washington. Crypto wallets are generally anonymous, making it challenging to identify who the purchasers were.
The dinner promotion “creates the specter of a pay-to-play deal” for wealthy spenders eager to bend the president’s ear, said Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel for the watchdog group State Democracy Defenders Action and a former White House associate counsel under President Barack Obama.
“He’s actually selling access, personal access, to him and to the White House if people invest in this meme coin, which really has no intrinsic value,” Canter said. …
The top 25 coin holders will also be invited to tour the White House and attend a private “VIP reception” with Trump.

Note that the anonymity of the meme coin means that many of its purchasers may be foreign. But it’s bad enough to have domestic bribery being advertised publicly. Never have we had a U.S. president who was so openly and obviously for sale.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.