Bulwark Takes - Trump Put His Bribes on a Leaderboard!

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

Tim Miller and Andrew Egger share their take on Donald Trump's latest crypto scam. They break down how Trump is profiting from a gala dinner invitation offered exclusively to top holders of his meme coin, raising serious ethical concerns.

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, I don't know, 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. Yeah, this crypto story, 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 all of us

making a mockery of all the corruption laws and things like that. But in theory, 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 22nd, 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 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.

It wasn't even a hockey stick. It was just like. 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 um yeah so it's uh it's all happening right out in the open some of them completely naked

it's just uh just where we're at 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 100, 200 grand for, you know, 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 like there has never in history been a 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 it was like okay it was like donors and friends and allies i got to sleep at the white house it's like you know whatever not great right now you know we shouldn't be using you know the people's white house you know and 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 like these types of like 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 right rightly it was a scandal like this is like a political it was like political supporters that were getting to sleep there. Massive, massive scandal. Right. Right. 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. 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 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 off the bat there about, oh my gosh, 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 Web site there. This tour is being arranged by Fight, Fight, Fight LLC. President Trump is appearing at the dinner as a guest and not soliciting any friends, but any funds from it.

I mean, it says that. But trump owns a giant stack of these meme coins that was the whole point is a fun solicitation the whole event is a fun solicitation what do you mean he's not soliciting funds 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 the total market cap of this thing is 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 like reporter covering the crypto world.

And, you know, our point. 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's 120 days or whatever after the launch of the coin before Trump, you can sell X amount of the coins. 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 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, five million, five point something million each from their respective coins. So, you know, sometimes you can overstate this by saying like, well, now the coin is worth $11 gazillion. And it's like, well, can he really get that money?

He's gotten five million already in cash out. And like we're now coming up on another period where you would assume that they would take more cash out. I don't, you know, we'll see. 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. Cause 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 23 to May 12, 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. Again, I'm not saying 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, if you were trying to dump your coin and convince everybody else not to dump theirs, isn't that exactly what you would do like 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 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 cover-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 he wouldn't let 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 that they went to try to hide or obfuscate or lie or cover it up and and trump is just like no no, fuck it. Like, I'll just we're just going to put out a leaderboard. It's just like, hey, you give me money. The more money you give me, the more the better seat you're going to get at the dinner. Yeah, no, there there is a there's a top 20. I forget exactly how the perks scale, but the top 25 get get, you know, the extra special VIP. I mean, it's just it's so open. I think I think you're like the point like the, the, the point you made just there is like so important. Cause 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 it. 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? 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 slash dinner. So it's, yeah, it's really amazing. If you heard from any MAGA ethics officials recently, and any ethics policy councils, anybody speaking out about this? Are those guys still around? I kind of of figured they all like they were all like the internal inspector generals, folks who all got fired because they made it harder to harder to, you know, 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 a an industry and a space that Trump is working pretty hard to deregulate. 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 that looks into crypto scams, they have like the DOJ, I don't know 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 it wasn't like or just 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.

It's great. It's all great. It's really great stuff. When you're a star, they let you do it. I guess the whole country is getting grabbed by the you-know-what.