THE MESSAGE POSTED on the $TRUMP website on 12 May 2025 reads like the opening gambit of an internet scam: ‘Congratulations, if you’re in the top 220 on the leaderboard we will be contacting you in the next 24 hours. Check your inbox (and spam folder) and expect a phone call for the Trump Official Dinner invitation and details… President Trump will see YOU on May 22 at the Gala Dinner in Washington D.C.’ Nonetheless, not even two weeks later, 215-odd men and, according to one attendee, ‘five to eight’ women trooped louchely into the plush confines of Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia. The guests were all aficionados of TrumpCoin, the presidential cryptocurrency introduced to duelling fanfares of hagiography and execration in early January 2025. Known, at least initially, only by their crypto wallet addresses, they paid between US$55,000 and $37.7 million for this audience with the President, the cost per plate averaging out to a cool million dollars. 

Dinner featured a ‘Trump organic field green salad’, a choice of filet mignon or pan-seared halibut, with mashed potatoes and cooked vegetables of questionable provenance, followed by warm lava cake. Punters received a souvenir hat and a copy of the ‘coin’ itself. Oddly, the latter looks nothing like its monetary antecedents, instead taking the form of what USA Today described as a ‘gaudy baseball card’ featuring the words ‘FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT’ superimposed over the now familiar image of Trump standing with a defiant raised fist after surviving an attempt on his life in Pennsylvania in July 2024. Attendees were also treated/subjected to a roughly twenty-five-minute address by the President in which he pronounced, ‘There is a lot of sense in crypto. A lot of common sense in crypto. And we’re honoured to be working on helping everybody here.’ Afterwards, without any further audience interaction, Trump departed by golf cart to his waiting helicopter, accompanied by the familiar strains of Village People’s ‘YMCA’. 

At least some of the guests were left cold by the whole affair. In an interview with CNBC, twenty-five-year-old entrepreneur/influencer Nick Pinto, who reportedly spent US$500,000 on TrumpCoin to secure what had been billed as ‘the most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the world’, lamented the quality of the food (‘it sucked’), the fact that his water glass was filled only once, and the content of Trump’s speech (‘pretty much bullshit’). 

Others in attendance included former NBA player Lamar Odom, touting his own personal cryptocurrency, the typographically unfortunate $ODOM (insert $GOMORRAH joke here) as well as TrumpCoin’s top holder, billionaire Chinese-born crypto investor Justin Sun, who was returning to the US for the first time since a Biden-era civil fraud lawsuit filed against him by the Securities and Exchange Commission was dropped under controversial circumstances in the aftermath of Trump’s second inauguration. While Sun and the twenty-four other biggest investors had been treated to a personal audience with the President and a VIP tour of the White House before the gala, the remaining crypto believers had to be content with simply being in the same room as the man himself. 

As Miles Klee wrote in Rolling Stone, ‘It had to be something of a disappointment for guests, including foreign executives, who went with the idea of swaying Trump on crypto issues and regulation.’ Yet for at least some of the guests, this proximity more than sufficed. ITV News reported that Kendall Davis – a young, formerly homeless African-American crypto investor – ‘credited the industry with making him a multimillionaire’, describing ‘the event as a rare, once-in-a-lifetime chance to share a meal with a sitting president’. 

Critics’ responses to Trump’s meme-coin dinner were predictably scathing. Sitting Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley, who joined the ranks of protestors lining the route to the golf club, dubbed the gathering the ‘Mount Everest of corruption’. Another Democratic senator, Elizabeth Warren, criticised Trump for using the presidency to enrich himself in unprecedented ways. Others highlighted how the sizeable TrumpCoin investments of the participants were, in effect, payments to Trump that sidestepped regulations on both the size of campaign contributions and the involvement of foreign donors in American politics. In response, the White House held that Trump had merely attended the event as a guest himself and hadn’t used it as a means of soliciting political contributions. 

Other internet users noted with some schadenfreude that 43 per cent of the 220 ‘winners’ had actually lost money – in some cases, a lot of money – on their TrumpCoin punts. According to The Guardian, by the time the dinner was held in late May, ninety-five unlucky top investors had incurred a combined net loss of US$8.95 million since the coin’s launch five months prior. The same article also noted that such losses align with broader trends: ‘It’s believed that 764,000 wallets – mostly belonging to small holders – have lost money on $TRUMP, according to data from the cryptocurrency and blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis. Meanwhile, just 58 wallets have made more than US$10m each on their purchases of the coin.’ 

Such disparities between the profits of a few and the losses of the many are not unique to TrumpCoin but also apply to meme coins more generally. So, given the likelihood of being parted from one’s money, what’s been driving the ebbs and flows of what one commenter has described as ‘crypto’s stupidest bubble’? What’s the point of a meme coin in the first place? 

THE ANSWER TO this question has eluded many critics of crypto (and even some of its advocates). In Rolling Stone, Mark Hays dismissed Trump’s meme coin as ‘one part a vehicle for personal profit, one part a playground taunt over federal ethics rules, and one part a crypto-fascist pledge of allegiance’. In The New Yorker, David D Kirkpatrick has highlighted the lack of gravitas of both $TRUMP in particular and meme coins more broadly: ‘$TRUMP doesn’t purport to hold value in the way that bitcoin or stablecoins do,’ he writes. ‘Nor does $TRUMP entitle a buyer to a vote on a company’s future direction, as World Liberty’s initial token does. It does not even convey the right to own a digital cartoon of Trump. It’s a meme coin, a novelty, a bit of fun – the fun, for those who enjoy it, of paying Donald Trump.’ Interviewed in USA Today, Andy Baehr, the managing director and head of product at CoinDesk and an advocate for the respectability of the crypto sector, decried TrumpCoin as bad for an industry ‘that was trying very hard to demonstrate that it’s serious, that it welcomes useful regulation, that it wants to be more regulated’. Trump’s high-profile move into meme coins threatens to derail all of this, he bristled, in no small part because meme coins are ‘definitionally and unashamedly frivolous’ and without ‘any utility’. 

If crypto is something of a joke in mainstream finance, then meme coins are often seen this way by mainstream crypto’s boosters, who often deride them as mere ‘shitcoins’ – either a sucker’s play or a trifle unworthy of serious attention. Yet, for my money, far from being a novelty, the meme coin is crucial to understanding the contemporary moment. Its appeal illuminates some alarming aspects of emergent economic and political practices and sentiments that are intimately connected to the rise of Trumpism in America and the forces of populism, authoritarianism and the right globally. 

TO MAKE SENSE of these claims, we first have to understand how meme coins differ from more traditional forms of crypto. Meme coins are cryptocurrencies whose value derives from their users’ membership in communities of affect. ‘Legitimate’ forms of cryptocurrency – bitcoin being the most famous, alongside Ethereum and other ‘altcoins’ with actual use cases and/or claims to technological innovation – are valued, at least in part, for their usefulness (actual or anticipated) in solving problems to do with the speed, security and/or functionality of peer-to-peer digital transactions. By contrast, meme coins lack use cases beyond their affective appeal – any value they might accrue is based on ‘vibes’ rather than a rational argument for their uptake. Here, TrumpCoin is actually representative. As Marquette University’s David Krause puts it, ‘the $TRUMP white paper explicitly acknowledges the token’s limited utility, stating its primary role as a community-driven and symbolic asset rather than a functional currency… Emphasi[sing] community engagement, the white paper highlights that the $TRUMP token’s value is largely tied to sentiment rather than practical applications.’ 

From a glass-half-empty perspective, this means that meme coins are indeed essentially frivolous – nothing other than dangerously volatile and in some senses delusionally speculative investments, reliant entirely on sentiment for their valuation. From a less dismissive perspective, however, we can see the value of meme coins as deriving precisely from their capacity to both betoken and cultivate membership in affective communities. For some enthusiasts (such as the pseudonymous author of a Bitget.com explainer), the community is precisely the point: ‘In the words of Richard Dawkins,’ they write, ‘a meme is a “unit of culture.” Let’s respect that definition and remember why we’re in crypto – not just to make money, but to belong.’ (Nonetheless we must bear in mind that such communities are not commonly wholesome, inclusive or pleasant, often channelling the worst strains of misogyny, racism and nihilism endemic to the contemporary internet.) 

A 2025 Guardian piece based on an interview with Professor of Finance Carol Alexander suggests that users buy $TRUMP ‘to show their support for the president. In this way, it’s similar to a “fan token”, like those produced by sports teams and players.’ Similarly, Krause notes the collective aspects of TrumpCoin ‘as a community-driven asset with limited practical utility… It encourages engagement among Trump supporters and connects them with related initiatives within a blockchain ecosystem.’ Moreover, he suggests, ‘the token also functions as a digital representation of Trump’s brand, appealing to his followers while offering speculative trading opportunities. Similar to owning Green Bay Packer stock, the $TRUMP coin emphasizes participation over practical use, encouraging a sense of belonging to Trump’s movement.’ 

Ironically, perhaps, given the recency of this trend, TrumpCoin as a token of political belonging harks back to the origins of coins themselves in ancient Greece. According to geographer Erica Schoenberger, ‘the history of gold coinage in antiquity is rooted in the contest for political power: it runs not from barter to coin but from personal seal to coin.’ The first Greek coins ‘were very much about exchange but not at all about commodity exchange’; instead, ‘discs of gold stamped with the personal seal of the gift giver’ figured prominently among the objects involved in the ‘lavish gift exchange’ used ‘to bind [political] leaders and their allies more closely together’. As such, ‘precious metal coins in Greece start out as a medium of political exchange and a store of political value.’ 

What’s more, neither Alexander’s nor Krause’s relatively anodyne take really captures the deeply felt nature of the matrix of belonging that both spawns and is spawned by successful meme coins. Anthropologist William Mazzarella, who has written extensively on the affective dimensions of populism, traces the ‘uncanny line’ from the symbolic charge of membership in the contemporary Trumpist right to early Christian communities. Drawing on the work of theologian Robert Yelle, he homes in on the Pauline distinction between ‘the holy charism (God’s grace)’ and ‘nomos (law – both Roman and Jewish)’. Mazzarella argues that this distinction ‘marked and animated the [early] Christian community as a shared body, at once physical, spiritual, and political. Every time Trump voters are dismissed as a “basket of deplorables,” the attack isn’t just symbolic. It’s substantial – felt as an assault on a shared body. And on the world in which that body wants to live.’ 

Participation in contemporary charismatic communities of sentiment – political, religious and economic – thus goes ‘much deeper than the usual sense in which the word is used in democratic theory to suggest an active involvement in an institutional democratic process’. Instead of calm, measured, civic-minded engagement with the substance of policy and a rational commitment to the democratic process, Mazzarella suggests that ‘charismatic participation involves an elated experience of shared bodily substance’. In such a context, TrumpCoin, like the MAGA hat, emerges as a fragment of the sacred, of what Australian political scientist Michael Dutton has termed ‘the smallest unit[s] of an affective cosmos’. Understanding both $TRUMP and meme coins more generally therefore requires us to ‘consider human motivations that’, per Mazzarella, ‘may have very little to do with the presumption of rational self-interest with which most economists and some political scientists like to work’. 

IN THE CONTEXT of meme coins, a focus on heroic action has gone hand in hand with the emphases on affect and belonging since the beginning. The first meme coin, Dogecoin, was introduced in 2013 as a send-up of bitcoin by two software engineers. Nonetheless, it quickly amassed a substantial community of online supporters that was later famously galvanised into the ‘Doge Army’ by the mercurial Twitter interventions of Elon Musk between December 2020 and May 2021. This unprecedented support prompted rapid spikes in Dogecoin’s valuation – until the bloom began to come off the rose in the aftermath of Musk’s infamous appearance on Saturday Night Live in which he admitted during a skit that Dogecoin was essentially ‘a hustle’. 

Even if Musk no longer commands quite the same measure of quasi-Messianic loyalty from his former army of crypto enthusiasts, his biography – possibly more myth than fact by this point – is emblematic of modes of capitalism characterised by personalised charisma and heroic action. One might expect this model of capitalism, centred on the figure of the swashbuckling billionaire, to be very far indeed from Max Weber’s influential envisioning of it as a realm of ‘specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart’ – ‘society devoid of charisma’. 

Yet Weber also identified forms of capitalism ‘much closer to the charismatic sphere of experience’. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he famously articulated a vision of modern and Western capitalism as profoundly shaped by the ‘worldly asceticism’ of Calvinism in which, as sociologist Anthony Giddens puts it, ‘the moral impulsion deriving from the [latter’s] commitment to the achievement of salvation’ is focused ‘upon economic activity’. The result of this transmutation has been a ‘sober bourgeois’ capitalism based upon and perpetuating continuity, rationality and systematicity and functioning via dispassionate, depersonalised action in a disenchanted world. As such, it’s come to be associated particularly with technocracy, or what political scientist Timothy Mitchell has referred to as ‘the rule of experts’. Under such stable, impersonal systems, according to Weber, ‘capitalism is identical with the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise.’ Moreover, the archetypal inhabitant of this rational, disenchanted cosmos is none other than Homo economicus, that preternatural embodiment of rational self-maximisation who’s long served as the basis of economics’ empirically impoverished understanding of human social relations. 

Alongside such sleek and more-than-a-little-unrealistic envisionings of human economic behaviour, Weber also described other modes of capitalist action. For example, he discussed ‘the capitalistic adventurer’ whose actions are ‘predominantly of an irrational and speculative character, or directed to acquisition by force, above all the acquisition of booty, whether directly in war or in the form of continuous fiscal booty by exploitation of subjects’. (He saw modern financial capitalism as having not unimportant affinities with this charismatic model.) It’s worth noting here that for Weber, charisma was a primarily political category. Alongside ‘rational’ and ‘traditional’ grounds, Weber saw charisma as the basis of one of three archetypes of ‘legitimate authority’. Where the first is the foundation of modern technocratic bureaucracies and the second of hidebound traditional forms of rule, charismatic authority is inimical to enduring structures in the first place. 

Weber described charisma as the ‘great revolutionary force’ of history, fundamentally opposed to established order and antithetical to the forces of routinisation that would seek to tame it. It’s less a basis for solid forms than a catalyst for change that, except in rare moments of enduring turmoil (for example, the Chinese Cultural Revolution), tends to quickly burn itself out. In this way, it’s fundamentally about heroic action in moments of rupture. Per Mazzarella, it’s both world-destroying and world-disclosing. While Weber emphasised its hostility towards, and foreignness to, the economic, I’d argue we’re living in an increasingly anti-technocratic and anti-economic moment, where disruption for disruption’s sake is in many places the order of the day in both political and economic spheres. It’s in this light that we need to think through the rise of both charismatic currencies and charismatic (or explicitly anti-economic) economies. Here the rise of meme coins can shed some important light. 

ACCORDING TO THE Slovak sociologist Dominik Želinský, capitalism has oscillated between rational and routinising technocratic forms on the one hand and chaotic and disruptive charismatic forms on the other. In this context, the longer term tendency towards charisma, which began with the decline of Keynesianism and the end of the Bretton Woods system of international financial arrangements in the early 1970s, has intensified rapidly in recent years with the rise of populist and authoritarian alternatives to technocracy across the globe. Alongside impersonal forms of economic action dedicated to this pursuit by means of ‘continuous, rational, capitalist enterprise’, we now often encounter modes of personalised, heroic economic behaviour ‘dominated by [a] numinous belief in business [and political] leaders (rather than [in] an impersonal system)’. The latter are, moreover, commonly characterised by a disruptive and often transgressive focus on ‘profound individual [and collective] rebirth and change of identity and rapturous emotions mustered through collective rituals’. Indeed, the past decade or so has ushered in a new paradigm based on personalisation, charisma and appeals to explicitly anti-rational heroic and disruptive economic activity. 

Such action can occur across multiple scales. It can, of course, take the form of the heroically disruptive interventions practised by prominent businessmen and politicians (and businessman-politicians) such as Musk, Trump or Javier Milei, the firebrand Argentine leader, as embodied perhaps by the totemic chainsaw brandished at economic regulation and societal decorum by the first and last of these. Yet it can also comprise both collective and solitary action by ordinary individuals. Examples of the former include the GameStop short squeeze of January 2021, in which the retail investor users of the subreddit r/wallstreetbets caused major financial losses for a number of large hedge funds and other institutional investors. More recently and less salubriously, such interventions halted play at several WNBA games when sex toys were thrown onto the court by crypto aficionados seeking to promote the eponymous meme coin Green Dildo Coin, which had, according to Vanity Fair, been ‘launched the day before the first dildo was thrown’. 

On an individual level, the paradigmatic form of charismatic anti-rational economic action is hodling (a backronym from ‘Holding On for Dear Life’). This term was famously coined by a drunken poster to an online bitcoin forum in December 2013: he was rationalising holding on to his Bitcoins in the face of a collapsing market and his own embarrassment at being ‘simply not good enough to beat the professional traders’. 

Anthropologist Yathukulan Yogarajah, who’s done extensive field research in the badlands of 4chan and other dark corners of the internet, describes the rise of hodling as a key moment in an ongoing ‘subversion of economic reason’ among crypto investors. According to Yogarajah, hodling ‘is one of the most important ideas within the crypto world… The ideal hodler…will not cut their losses and sell when traditional financial wisdom might say otherwise’. Where Homo economicus buys low and sells high, Yogarajah highlights a ‘popular comedic mantra on 4chan: buy high sell low’. 

This ‘remixing’ of economic reason, Yogarajah argues, foregrounds ‘the general feeling that crypto is, to put it crudely, drunk finance’. Indeed, from the perspective of the traditional financial world, it’s pure lunacy. But for hodlers, it’s a courageous intervention against a world that’s otherwise stacked against them. Moreover, it’s a means of cultivating the ‘extreme uncertainty and volatility’ that are the preconditions of profiting from meme coins. Only under such conditions can ‘placing a small amount of money…see over a 1,000 per cent increase (or a loss of 100 per cent)’. Where actors motivated solely by received versions of economic rationality would see only madness or frivolity, Yogarajah identifies a powerfully charismatic (in the sense of anti-economic) attempt to reorient an unfavourable playing field in one’s favour. In such a frame, meme coins are not frivolous in the slightest; instead, they’re matters of financial life and death. 

I WANT TO conclude by briefly relating these forms of emergent economic unreason to my own ongoing research into monetary forms in Zimbabwe. This southern African nation, mired in economic crisis since 1997, has witnessed the destruction of its national currency via hyperinflation in 2008–09 and repeated failed (and failing) attempts to reintroduce a national currency over the last half decade. In the last dozen years, Zimbabwe’s economy has dollarised and dedollarised and dollarised again, going from a largely cash economy to one where 96 per cent of transactions were done electronically back to one where, in 2025, 70 per cent of transactions are now again being done using cash in US dollars. 

Almost invariably, when I broach the possibility that Australia might have something to learn from Zimbabwe, the slightly nervous response has been more or less the same: ‘But Australia isn’t Zimbabwe!’ An associate editor of an online outlet for popular academic publication was even more sceptical: ‘The area that most needs work is the lesson from Zimbabwe. I’m not sure I understand the issue, nor whether it has any relevance to Australia.’ Freighted in such responses is the notion that there’s a difference in kind between economic reason and rationality here at home, and the unreason and irrationality that Australians might imagine exists exclusively out there in the largely informal economies of the developing world. Similarly, my Zimbabwean friends regularly refer to their country’s economy as a ‘circus’, a ‘funhouse’ or a ‘freak show’ – and for years have looked wistfully to the West as the locus of economic reason, longing for ‘a central bank that isn’t campaigning all the time’ (notably, this was said before Trump began to actively meddle in the affairs of the American Federal Reserve System) and money that ‘doesn’t require loyalty’ but ‘simply works’. 

Some anthropologists (most famously Janet Roitman in her 2023 book Anti-Crisis) caution against overdrawing the contrasts between what one might term crisis and non-crisis economies, noting that significant convergence exists between the two. One telling example is the parallel between the Zimbabwean Government characterising its new, putatively national currency, the Zimbabwe Gold or ZiG, as the basis for a charismatic narrative of economic nationalism and resilience and the ways in which $TRUMP and other meme coins are attempting to mobilise affective communities of users. 

But perhaps a more profound and disturbing aspect of this convergence is the underlying economic nihilism it signifies. The convergence of the ZiG and the meme coin as affective projects highlights the growing sense of exclusion from pre-existing systems of wealth generation among many young people in the developed world. It bears emphasising the degree to which anti-rational charismatic and heroic economic action are not simply the fellow travellers of populism, authoritarianism and/or fascism but in fact derive from the growing sense among many young people that the economic systems that worked for their parents and grandparents will no longer work for them – that rational behaviour and, by extension, technocracy more broadly have become dead ends. 

Anthropologist Annaliese Milano Merfield notes that ‘the crypto community largely comprises young people who view their financial prospects as bleak – especially when held up against the wealth and opportunities enjoyed by their parents at a similar time of life’. She suggests, moreover, that ‘their efforts to build financial alternatives to existing forms of money and finance have undermined the state’s role in mediating the value of money and the flow of capital’. Ironically, in some ways, this growing constituency appears to be less rational and pragmatic and more given to economic unreason than the Zimbabweans, who have been forced to deal with their circus economy for nearly three decades. Nonetheless, this rising tide of exclusion highlights the degree to which meme coins, far from being some sort of freakish sideshow, are in fact utterly central to understanding economic (and, alas, political) life in the contemporary world. 

The lesson here is not a happy one, but it is a necessary one. If we’re unable to rebuild confidence in the power of the rational workings of the economy to contribute to general welfare – in the ability, that is, of measured economic action to lead to lasting wealth – we’ll face a rising tide of economic and political nihilism that goes beyond questions of mere left and right. In this new world order, measured and rational interventions may well be replaced by radically disruptive, charismatic economic and political action as a kind of revivified propaganda of the deed. 

_{Image: Crystal Mapes from Unsplash}