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- [00:01]
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- [00:14]
Andrew Egger
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- [00:15]
Bridget
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Bridget
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- [01:04]
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- [01:14]
Tim Miller
D.Com hey everybody, it's Tim Miller from the Bulwark, here with my colleague Andrew Egger, author of the Morning Shots newsletter. And we're here to discuss the most ostentatious, absurd scam in the history of the presidency happening right now under our nose with the Trump Meme coin. We've been covering the Trump crypto grift a lot here, but this one I think is the most clownish, the most right on the nose. I don't know what you want to describe it, Andrew. Explain to people what is happening.
- [01:44]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, this crypto story, it's, I keep almost forgetting about it because it's only Trump like nakedly enriching himself at the expense of the entire body politic at the expense of, you know, all of us making a mockery of all the, all the corruption laws and things like that. But in theory that's, that's the worst that's happening. And you know, there's all this other shit going on, but this is just kind of an amazing thing he rolled out this Meme Coin, you know, ages ago, right before he became president. He is now, or I guess technically, the people who run the Meme Coin. What they're doing is they have launched have Dinner with President Trump, the most exclusive invitation in the world. The website proclaims it's the top 220 holders of the Meme Coin are going to get to sit down in May, May 22, and have an unforgettable gala dinner with the President. It's amazing because not only is it just like, hey, good news, if you happen to be the person who holds the most Trump Coin as of the time of this announcement, no, there's going to be a rolling average with leaderboards from now until the dinner. And if you yourself become and are able to maintain one of the top 220 people in the world in terms of owning this particular Meme Coin, you get to do it. You get to come along, you get to have the dinner. It's all great. And as you might imagine, this is quite the perk. As soon as they announced this, the price of this Meme Coin spikes. Donald Trump owns a bunch of this Meme Coin.
- [03:08]
Tim Miller
Wasn't even a hockey stick.
- [03:11]
Andrew Egger
Yep, straight up. Peaked at about 49% jump in the price of the coin. Trump owns a bunch of this stuff. It's a bunch of free money directly in his pocket from God knows who. I guess we will know who come the evening of the dinner. That'll be nice. Or he will, at least. Yeah. So it's. It's all happening right out in the open. Some of them completely naked. It's just. Just where we're at.
- [03:29]
Tim Miller
We'll know some. And maybe. Who the fuck knows? I was about to say, you know, the. The Saudis or like the, you know, kind of Russian scammers won't actually show up to the dinner. But why not at this point? I mean, they have a leaderboard and it's just like. I always go back to the Spiro Agnew resignation. I know it feels like the olden days, but it was like Spiro agnew got like 20 grand or something for, you know, in today's dollars, it's like maybe 100, 200 grand for, you know, it's a little payoff for a project, you know, some public works project in Maryland, and he had to resign. The vice president resigned over this. And what we have here is, rather than brown paper bagging it, people just are going to go to a fancy dinner where they just pay their offerings to the president. It is the craziest scam. I mean, it's like, oh, this is an unforgettable dinner. I'd say it's unforgettable. This is the most. There's never in history been a dinner that. Where the President hosted the people that are paying him off personally. It's just like. It's like the Clinton. After the dinner, which is at the golf club, they go on the White House tour, as you mentioned, like the Clinton Lincoln bedroom scandal, which are no fans of here at the Bulwark. But it's like, okay, it was like donors and friends and allies that got to sleep at the White House. It's like, you know, whatever. Not great, right? We shouldn't be using the people's White House and letting whatever. George Clooney and the richest Democrat, Jeffrey Katzenberg. I don't even know if they slept there. But you know what I mean, these types of Hollywood rich people sleeping in the White House, like, we shouldn't be doing that. But it's like, wasn't like Bill Clinton was making the money. It was like a political. It was like political supporters that were getting to sleep there. Massive, massive scandal. Rightly, it was a scandal. This is like Trump is. It's Trump's money. They're paying Trump. They're paying off the President of the United States. And instead of, like, doing it in secret, they've got a fucking leaderboard.
- [05:33]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously the leaderboard is a little bit like semi. Semi anonymized, right, because it's like crypto wallets on there for now. But, but, but you're totally right. And it's also just head and shoulders over even anything that was going on in the first Trump administration, right? And we had all these ethics scandals, right, like right off the bat there about, oh, my gosh, he's. He hasn't really sufficiently divested from his companies and all that stuff. And it's like. I mean, even all that is like such a. Such a. We're so far past all of that where, I mean, like, like, yes, it's technically, this is a different legal entity, right? I mean, like, there's. There's all these hilarious disclaimers all over the website there. This tour is being arranged by Fight Fight. President Trump is appearing at the dinner as a guest and not soliciting any friends, any funds from it. I mean, it says that, but Trump owns a giant stack of these meme coins. That was the whole point.
- [06:21]
Tim Miller
The whole point is a fun solicitation. The whole event is a Fund solicitation. What do you mean he's not soliciting funds?
- [06:26]
Andrew Egger
And when, when people buy up a bunch of this stuff, obviously the point of that is to spike the cost of the coin, which profits Donald Trump directly to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. I don't know. I mean, hundreds of millions. I don't, I don't know what the total market cap of this thing is.
- [06:39]
Tim Miller
People should go watch if they missed it. Molly White on last weekend, so it's here on the YouTube feed, and she is maybe the best reporter covering the crypto world. And you know, and she pointed out that we're coming up on a period where, you know, based on like the rules that were set, that Trump, you know, like, there's a freeze period on some of the coins that he has. It's like, you feel ridiculous even talking about this since this is all just so fake. But it's like there was, you know, there's 120 days or whatever after the launch of the coin before, you know, Trump, you can sell X amount of the coins. Right. And so we're coming up on that. So spiking it before that is benefits. Assuming they're going to sell some coins and turn it into real fiat dollars that at least for now, you can trade for goods and services in this country. And, but already to date, I'm going from memory, but I think she said that, that both the Trump and Melania, like, their wallets had already taken out, I think 4, 5 million, 5 point something million each from their respective coins. So sometimes you can overstate this by saying, like, well, now the coin is worth eleven gazillion dollars. And it's like, well, can he really get that money? He's gotten 5 million already in cash out. And we're now coming up on another period where you would assume that they would take more cash out. We'll see.
- [08:05]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, I mean, I obviously have not reported on any of that stuff to nearly the same extent that Molly has. But I would say that, like, if that were the kind of scam that you were trying to run as Donald Trump, I mean, how do I sell my stuff without crashing the price of the coin is basically the question there because you don't want to make it look like you're rug pulling your base. Well, right here on this website, how do you qualify to be among the top 220? It says right here, from April 23rd to May 12th, hold as much Trump coin as you can. Your average holdings during this period will determine your ranking the more Trump coin you hold and the longer you hold it, the higher your ranking will be. It's just like it's. Again, I'm not saying that's what the, that's what the move is or that's what the scam is. He gets to benefit from it whether or not he's trying to cash it all out right this second. But come on, I mean, like, if, if you were trying to dump your coin and convince everybody else not to dump theirs, would isn't that exactly what you would do? Just, just introduce this extrinsic benefit of if, hey, you know, the price might be dipping, but if you hold, you get this fun dinner with the President. So yeah, I mean, it's all just so unbelievably. And this is like one of 15 of his crypto schemes. Like, it's just the, one of the day.
- [09:13]
Tim Miller
It's just so transparent and like that's the tie at all this and it's the difference. You know, it's like you can do this throughout anything in history, right? Like the Hillary Clinton email scandal, like, like the Trump version of it is just like, whatever, like we're just gonna, you know, do everything on signal, like, you know what I mean? Like the oftentimes, you know, they always say like, the COVID up is worse than the crime. Right. Like, a lot of times historically in politics, politicians got in trouble because they were doing something that was, you know, either a little outside the lines, a little unethical, or you wouldn't want the public to know. And like the, a big part of the media story would just be, you know, the ways in which the links were that they went to try to hide or obfuscate or lie or cover it up. And Trump is just like, no, fuck it, we're just going to put out a leaderboard and it's just like, hey, you give me money and the more money you give me, the better seat you're going to get at the dinner?
- [10:09]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, no, there is a, there's a top 20. I forget exactly how the perks scale, but the top 25 get the extra special VIP. I mean, it's so open. I think you're like, the point you made just there is like so important because, like in the first term, like Trump was often blundering across some of these lines. Like he was, he was trying within, you know, he was at least occasionally making these like, sort of spasms toward trying to uphold the form, even if he wasn't really upholding the, the, the spirit of the law. And all this stuff and like, the, the outcome there was just like, well, even when he got things wrong and even when it was like a scandal, he would just be shameless about. He wouldn't apologize and everyone would eventually move on. And now it's like, it's not just that you are roughly coloring in the lines and then not apologizing and not doing anything about it. When you mess up, it's just. There's no more lines at all. Right. He's just, it's just all out there in the open. And anytime anybody wants to talk about it, the line is just like, well, of course that's what the lying media would have you believe, but it's not the lying media. It's all right here on gettrumpmemes.com dinner. So it's. Yeah, it's really, it's really amazing.
- [11:09]
Tim Miller
If you heard from any MAGA ethics officials recently, you know, and any ethics policy councils, you know, any, anybody, Anybody speaking out about this.
- [11:20]
Andrew Egger
Are those guys still around? I kind of figured they all, like, they were all like the internal inspector general's folks who all got fired because they made it harder to, harder to implement the President's agenda at various points. But no, I mean, this is like, I guess we should just mention super quickly in passing that, like, this is an industry and a space that Trump is working pretty hard to deregulate.
- [11:39]
Tim Miller
I mean, deregulate is true, but like, barely suffices to explain what they're doing. Right. Like, they've essentially shut down the division that looks into scams while they're running a scam. Right. And in addition to shutting down, the division looks into crypto scams. They have like the doj, I don't have the language in front of me, but it has essentially like either stopped the investigation or cleared the investigations or closed the investigations against several crypto companies. At least one crypto company got their fine back. So they weren't just shutting down the investigation. It was just like, yeah, you know, the Biden DOJ decided you had a $70 million fine or whatever, and it's like, you can just have that back. So it's great. It's all great. It's really great stuff.
- [12:27]
Andrew Egger
When you're a star, they let you do it.
- [12:30]
Tim Miller
Yeah. I guess the whole country is getting grabbed by the, you know what?