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’.