Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. Its corruption is unprecedented. Qatar's gift of a jet is just one example. His memecoin is another.
David Yaffe-Bellany and Eric Lipton at NYT:
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.
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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.
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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 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 conducting 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.”
