Night of 220 $TRUMPETS (video)

At a very expensive dinner, Donald Trump wines and dines the biggest investors in his meme coin...whoever they are

Good morning! Here is today’s ramble:

Here is the transcript, edited for clarity:

Good morning—for you, it is Friday morning. For me, it is Thursday evening, 7:15 p.m. May 22nd, 2025. As I am sitting here, talking into the machine in my office, 220 guests, owners of large stakes in Trump’s meme coin (which is called dollar-sign TRUMP, or “$TRUMP”)—so, basically, $TRUMPETS—are at a private dinner with the President. And they’re at the dinner because they spent a lot of money on the meme coin.

And we don’t know who they are, because a list of participants was not offered. When asked about it, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said, “No, this has nothing to with the White House. He’s doing this on his personal time.” Taking the bribe on his personal time—you know, that makes it okay somehow. But Trump’s got 220 people there, all of them investors, quote unquote, in this meme coin. And the top 25 are going to an even more intimate event after the dinner, probably a tour of the White House, although they walked back that language and that promise.

There was even a contest. Trump had a whiteboard up where he was posting who had the most ownership stake in his meme coin—like a scene from Glengarry Glen Ross. Like, you know, “Third prize is a set of steak knives.”

So he had this going and the person apparently who has the most meme coin $TRUMP—you know, dollar sign Trump; $TRUMP—the chief $TRUMPET is this guy named Justin Sun. Born in China, but he is American. He runs a company called TRON, which does some tech thing that I’m not sure what it is. And he’s best known for spending $7.2 million for a piece of modern art that was a banana duct taped to a wall, which he paid for and then ate the banana. So that’s who we’re dealing with. That’s number one.

Number two is a company called MemeCore, which is based in Singapore. We don’t know anything else about it. Based in Singapore, which is obviously where a lot of Asian investors do business—it’s the hub of financial activity for that part of the world. Could be Chinese money—who knows?

The third one is called Wintermute. And that’s based in London, which could be British but is probably Russian. We don’t know, have no idea who any of these people are. Like I said, they didn’t have to reveal their identities. We just don’t know. We weren’t told. Nobody said anything.

So we have all of these mostly foreign investors, if you want to call them investors—investing in meme coin is really just investing in Donald Trump, because here’s the catch: a meme coin, as distinct from another kinds of crypto, like a real crypto, has no value like at all.

(And I know this is all pie-in-the-sky stuff, even for me. My eyes glaze over when I start thinking about it.)

Bitcoin is pegged to the price of energy. Why is it pegged to the price of energy? Because in order for you to mint—or mine, as it’s called in the parlance—a new Bitcoin, there’s a finite number of Bitcoin and they release one every whatever it is, month or so. And in order to do that, you have to crack this code. That’s why it’s called crypto, right? It’s this long code that takes a supercomputer to crack. And if you crack the right code and get the right combination, then you get your Bitcoin. This process require enormous amounts of energy, because massive computers have to process at massive speeds, super fast, to try to figure out these codes. And that’s what it is. So therefore, the more energy you use, the greater your chance of mining a Bitcoin. That’s why it’s pegged to energy. Because it takes a lot of energy to power the computers, and you need the computers to crack the code to get the Bitcoin. And each Bitcoin is worth, I don’t know, a hundred fifty grand or something. [Note: $111,430—I was close.] I don’t even know. I haven’t paid attention to it, but it’s worth a lot. So it’s worth doing, I guess.

Bitcoin has been around for a while. There’s a finite supply of it. It seems to be the most trusted one out there. And it is pegged to something real, and it is something that people do use to pay for stuff. Not usually—it’s more of a hoarding thing, as Aja Raden explained on my podcast years ago. It’s really designed to hoard.

But a meme coin—which is what the $TRUMP is, it’s a meme coin—has no value. It’s nothing. I mean, anybody can do it. I can be like, “Hey, we’re going to have a PREVAIL meme coin.” And then people will just go buy it because they like the meme, or they think it’s funny or whatever. They think this is the thing, the next big thing. This is the thing that’s going to hit.

So it’s usually some celebrity or influencer or something like that creates this thing, and people buy into it for…some reason. And people who get out of it fast enough and kind of ride the wave make money, and everybody else loses a ton of money. And what you get in exchange is—let me check my notes—nothing. You get nothing in exchange. You pay this money for this wild ride that, you know, 999 times out of a thousand winds up with you losing money. So it’s basically a scam. It’s like a scam. Other than the fact that everyone knows it’s a scam when they walk in the door. So the President of the United States is running a scam. Great! It’s a legal scam, if you’re not the President of the United States, but it’s still a scam. It’s a sleazy thing to do, to do this meme coin, in my opinion.

So when Trump released it, it peaked, you know, whatever it costs at the beginning, a dollar, whatever it was, it peaked at seventy four dollars. That was the price of the coin. And then it crashed right down to eight dollars. So people who bought in at the very beginning rode the wave. They sold at the right time. They made a lot of money. Because normal people were buying into this also hoping to make a lot of money, but it was probably already too late for them. In effect, Trump was stealing money from people, or people like these rich owners of this meme coin were buying into it because they wanted access to him. So they were basically paying money for access. It’s a big payola. Again, it’s a bribe—you know, whatever you want to call it.

The initial market capitalization was $27 billion, of which Trump owned $20 billion. But, again, of what? It’s not real estate. It’s like the opposite of that. It’s just this thing that exists in space called $TRUMP. I don’t know why anyone would buy this.

I read a bunch of articles about it because I wanted to understand it better. And the thing that kept popping out at me in the articles is that Trump’s made money on commissions. And I was like, how do they make money on commissions—the commissions and fees that are associated with this. People talk a lot about the price of the meme coin going up and down or whatever, but the fees and collecting the fees is where the money is. He made a total of—and this is an estimate by Chainalysis, which covers this stuff—$320 million in fees, just fees, which has nothing to do with possessing the meme coin.

How does this work? Well, when you’re selling a meme coin, you do it on something called a decentralized exchange. And that means that there’s no, like, central bank. It’s like this pool of money. So when $TRUMP originally released, they were going to mint one billion of these coins. They released 20 percent of them initially, half of that 20 percent. So 10 percent overall went into what’s called a liquidity pool, which goes into the centralized exchange. And in that exchange, somehow—and again, I don’t quite understand how—it pairs the buyers and the sellers.

But here’s the catch: every time there’s a transaction between buyer and seller, a small fee is collected by the creator of the meme coin. That’s Trump—or the people behind him, it’s his kids or whoever the hell it is. The Trump people were raking in these fees.

That doesn’t even account for the fact that he probably sold a lot of it when the price was high, knowing that it would do that, right? So he’s already got like $320 million from this, and that doesn’t even count the actual meme coin he owns.

Making these rich people buy the meme coin also inflates the value of his meme coin, right? So $TRUMP is now worth more—not because it means anything or has any value or any utility or anything, but it’s worth something because these rich dudes have it. The guy who ate the banana that he spent $6.2 million for—he has $TRUMP meme coin. Therefore, you know, he’s going to probably hold on to it and maybe the thinking is it’ll retain its value. I don’t know. So there’s also the money from that.

And if Trump loses money on owning the meme coin, who cares? He just literally pulled it out of his ass anyway. It’s not like he bought a piece of property and then loses money on the property. There is no property. There’s nothing there. It’s a figment of the collective imagination of MAGA. And the collective imagination of MAGA is not the most fecund ground that we’ve seen.

So what’s happening again tonight. Again, as I’m recording this, it’s Thursday, May 22nd. It’s now 7.30 p.m. What is happening right now is that 220 owners of $TRUMP, the $TRUMPETS as I call them, are at the White House at a dinner. We don’t know who most of them are. They’re only identified through their Bitcoin wallet. I assume Trump knows who they are. And maybe we’ll find out by the time you’re listening to this. Maybe we’ll have a better idea of who showed up at the White House. But I’d like to think, national-security-wise, that they can get people in and out of the White House without us finding out who they are. So we may never know. You know, probably stuff will leak out, but we don’t really know who’s there.

Supposedly, it’s a lot of non-Americans that are there, a lot of foreign investment, which, again, is illegal. The president’s not supposed to collect this kind of money anyway, but money coming from foreign powers or foreign nationals is explicitly illegal.

And what is Trump going to give these guys in exchange? Who knows! You know, maybe the tariff on such and such a country is going to get lowered. Maybe, you know, whatever industry that they run is going to be deregulated more. Trump is now suddenly interested in crypto, and all the crypto bros are making him interested in crypto. And he’s only interested in crypto because he can make money on it. I read there was a the owner of a small business, a shipping company, that needed to get around the tariffs and wanted to put their foot in and lobby for something. So they actually bought meme coin just to be able to go to this thing and lobby and meet the president and hope to say, “Dude, tariff help!’ or whatever they’re going to say.

It’s explicitly pay for play. It’s pay for play with foreigners. You know, I have no objection to people coming to this country. I love it. I love the people from other countries spending their money in the United States, but when they’re using the money to buy influence with our president, that is a huge, huge national security issue—especially when the president is a mobster.

So this is not great. It’s just an egregious, egregious example of corruption.

And this is going to keep happening. The price of the meme coin had dropped. And then when Trump announced this White House dinner, it went back up again. That means that people in the know could just go out and buy it when it was low, wait until he announced the thing, and immediately sell. There’s lots of interest in it. It was at $8. It went up to $11. They dump it at $11. And you know, you make a lot of money if you know what’s going to happen. But of course, crypto isn’t really regulated in the way that the stock market is regulated. And you’re not going to believe this, but the crypto bros don’t want it to be regulated and neither does organized crime.

As I see it, crypto exists mostly as a substitute for cash so that criminals can pay off other criminals, spies can pay off other spies, bribes can be untraceable. So that’s the world we’re living in now. I wanted you to know. I dressed up because I thought maybe, you know, at the last minute I’d get an invitation. But alas, I’m not one of the 220 owners of a sufficient supply of $TRUMP. I guess I was only 221 on the list, so I have to eat by myself.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on. It’s crazy. The whole week is a madness. Please tune into the show, The Five 8, live tonight. I will be there with LB, Stephanie Koff. We were off last week, so we have double the crazy to talk about. I hope you’ll join us.

And it’s Memorial Day. So everybody have a great long weekend. And, you know, we can remember, we decent humans, what Memorial Day actually is, because I’m guessing that Trump will not.

Keep on keepin’ on, keep on pushin’ till it’s understood, and we shall prevail!

CORRECTION: I’d heard reports of the dinner being at the White House, but it took place at Trump’s DC area golf course.