More than 200 guests will converge on the manicured lawns of one of Donald Trump's ritzy golf courses this week for an event that has been branded equal parts grotesque and bizarre.

The only way to score an invite to the special dinner organised at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia is to be one of the highest-rolling buyers of $TRUMP, the memecoin minted by the president himself.

More than 200 guests will converge on the manicured lawns of one of Donald Trump’s ritzy golf courses this week for an event that has been branded equal parts grotesque and bizarre.

The only way to score an invite to the special dinner being organised at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia is to be one of the highest-rolling buyers of $TRUMP, the memecoin minted by the president himself.

The top 25 investors — already loosely described as the “crypto aristocracy” — will be granted a private audience with Trump before the meal, along with an uncertain guarantee of a White House tour.

“The most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the World,” the event’s website claimed. That line, along with the mention of the White House, has since vanished.

It comes as Trump and his cabinet have pushed to make America the “crypto capital” of the world. Despite previous disdain for cryptocurrency, the 78-year-old has moved quickly to align his administration with the industry.

His executive order establishing a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” suggests he is pushing for deregulation and domestic mining — much to the delight of the sector’s largest players.

The Republican’s characteristically shameless brand of self-promotion and philosophy of wealth hoarding were always going to lead him to crypto.

In the weeks before the announcement, $TRUMP was drifting toward irrelevance. But once access to the president was baked into the token, the price surged out of control.

And as the president of the richest nation on the planet, the idea of using his official position to market his self-branded currency has blown a fuse among ethicists.

Do Presidents and memecoins mix?

Memecoins lean into absurdity by design and generally make their gains from internet dwellers jumping on the hypewagon. A few simple tweets from Elon Musk in 2021 sent the bizarre “DOGE” coin asset surging. Millions of wannabe crypto investors were hanging onto every word that came out of the eccentric billionaire, who was openly demonstrating his power to move mountains simply by posting online.

As world markets sail out to uncharted waters, the ethical questions surrounding the promotion of inherently unstable currencies by extremely powerful individuals are immense.

Watchdogs are now asking whether Trump’s particular coin has crossed a legal line. Critics say his golf course crypto dinner may violate federal ethics rules or even the Constitution’s emoluments clause, depending on who’s in the room and how they got there.

“It’s an ethics nightmare,” former White House ethics counsel under the Obama administration Norm Eisen said via the Washington Post.

Senators Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren went even harder and suggested the entire charade undermined the sanctity of the nation’s highest office.

“The American people deserve the unwavering assurance that access to the presidency is not being offered for sale to the highest bidder in exchange for the President’s own financial gain,” they wrote in a letter to the Office of Government Ethics.

Who is going to Trump’s crypto dinner?

Since its January debut, $TRUMP has been volatile.

It soared, it collapsed, and it’s now rebounding — up roughly 30 per cent since the dinner announcement, though still well below its peak.

Fifty-eight investors made over $10 million each, while more than 760,000 wallets lost money.

Chainalysis estimates insiders connected to Trump are sitting on around $10 billion worth of the coin.

Roughly 80 per cent of the token supply is held by a Delaware LLC linked to entrepreneur Bill Zanker — previously behind Trump-themed NFTs — and an affiliate of the Trump Organization.

Trading fees alone have netted insiders hundreds of millions.

The list of investors attending the Virginia dinner includes a peculiar mix of blockchain evangelists, MAGA devotees, crypto sleuths and international investors. One guest is flying in from Asia to promote a blockchain startup focused on meme culture, while another from New York says he’s using the event to wear Trump-branded watches and defend the president’s access model as more democratic than traditional fundraisers.

Then there’s the mysterious figure named “Ogle,” a masked cybersecurity specialist who amassed $3.1 million in $TRUMP and insists the dinner is open to anyone “willing to pay”.

But blockchain forensics firm Inca Digital says at least 17 of the 25 wallets eligible for the VIP reception have received funds from non-US crypto exchanges, many of which are off-limits to American users.

That includes a wallet labelled “Sun,” holding nearly $18 million in $TRUMP, widely suspected to belong to Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun.

He’s best known for buying a $6.2 million banana-taped-to-a-wall art piece — and more recently, for investing $75 million into Trump-linked World Liberty Financial.

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