Source: Rolling Stone
Trump Pumped and Dumped His Crypto Backers With Dud Dinner Party
Miles Klee
Fri, May 23, 2025 at 6:28 PM EDT 4 min read
As though launching his own meme coin days before the inauguration wasn't potentially corrupt enough, three months later, President Donald Trump had his crypto team announce a special dinner party for the 220 top holders of $TRUMP, calling it the "most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the World." It temporarily juiced the value of the token by 60 percent as investors spent millions to secure their seats -- all in a day's work for a head of state who has gone above and beyond to cash in on his office, with his family's fortune ballooning by almost $3 billion thanks to their various crypto plays.
Attendees of the Thursday night banquet at Trump National Golf Club outside Washington, D.C., paid an average of $1 million to get in the room, spending close to $400 million in total. But while the 25 biggest $TRUMP whales were treated to a more exclusive reception with the president, it seems the rest forked over that cash for little more than one another's company, a reportedly sub-par meal, and generic remarks from Trump, who didn't even stick around to meet anyone before catching a golf cart back to his helicopter. It had to be something of a disappointment for guests, including foreign executives, who went with the idea of swaying Trump on crypto issues and regulation.
"It was the worst food I've ever had at a Trump golf course," Nicholas Pinto, a business influencer who poured around $300,000 into Trump's coin, told Wired of the entree, a surf-and-turf dish that included halibut and filet mignon. Speaking to Fortune, he criticized the latter as a "Walmart steak." Pictures of the plates suggested that the dinner was barely up to airline standards -- though it's not as if you can expect much better from the kitchen at the country club of a man who also put his name on what was once suggested to be "the worst restaurant in America." (Even a Thanksgiving reservation at Mar-a-Lago gets you what appears to be the equivalent of a frozen TV dinner.)
Among those who did enjoy some extra perks was Justin Sun, ...
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Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-pumped-dumped-crypto-backers-222830540.html