Welcome to the Art of the Scam.
On September 30th, Donald’s Trump Coin Club announced a new competition, because apparently what the country needs while we’re at war is another way for people to hand over their money to the Trump family.
The event is being marketed as the “most exclusive dinner in the world” and it’s scheduled for November 22nd at Trump National outside Washington DC. The top 185 holders of Donald’s Trump meme coin qualify for the dinner. The top 29 get a VIP reception with Donald himself, and the top four get eighteen carat gold Trump watches. But here’s the thing, and pay attention to this because it’s the whole con in a nutshell: you don’t simply buy a ticket.
Your position is determined by how much Trump meme coin you hold and how long you hold it. The leaderboard closes on November 12th. The more you hold, the longer you hold it, the higher you climb. Which is another way of saying the closer you get to Donald and the more opportunities you have to get influence with him.
Politico reports that investors put nearly two billion dollars into Trump meme coin while competing for spots at Donald’s first meme coin dinner in 2025. Two billion dollars. From retail investors. Who thought they were going to get a return.
And this isn’t the only incentive to keep holding. The Coin Club has also offered top holders access to a Formula One weekend in Singapore and a three-day VIP package surrounding Super Bowl 61 in Los Angeles 2027. But here’s where it gets really interesting, at least in the fine print.
According to the Trump website, the coin has no payment functionality or transactional utility, and it isn’t redeemable for goods, services, or cash. So what you’re buying is essentially the privilege of being scammed by Donald Trump. Which apparently, based on the dollars involved, is a privilege millions of people are willing to pay for.
So why did Donald and his family get into cryptocurrency in the first place, especially considering that until fairly recently he didn’t even know what it was? In June of 2025, Donnie, his oldest son, offered his version of an explanation on CNBC’s Squawk Box. This is what he said:
I wasn’t involved in the meme coin. I’m more focused on obviously the stablecoin, the Bitcoin mining, some of those things. But the reality is I think a lot of these things in the meme coin, you’re taking responsibility for the meme. The reality of the meme coin is it’s sort of a proof of concept that the crypto world understands exactly what I was talking about earlier, that the markets may not necessarily be fair. The traditional banking system may not be fair to them. So it’s a proof of concept of what I think we can move the needle in crypto. And I think that’s going to be the future of finance. It’s going to be the future of banking almost without question if we can accelerate that process by going all in on it.
Let me translate that for you. By proof of concept, what that useless person means is how many rubes are there in the world and how much can Donald and his useless children grift off of them? That’s the proof of concept that’s being challenged here. Donnie and Eric have become leading promoters of the family’s crypto business because it is making them so much money. Money that they would never have been able to earn on their own and certainly not if Donald weren’t sitting in the Oval Office signing executive orders that benefit their bottom line.
Reuters did some digging and reported in July that while Donnie and Eric were out there publicly encouraging investment in crypto projects, Donald’s financial disclosures showed substantial crypto proceeds flowing into more traditional investments. Stocks and bonds. The safe stuff. While they were telling retail investors to get in on the ground floor of the future of finance, Donald was quietly moving his ill-gotten gains into the kind of investments you make when you know the thing you’re promoting is a scam.
Donald wasn’t the only member of the family to launch a meme coin. Of course not. Melania launched $Melania two days after $Trump. Because why miss an opportunity to exploit people’s misplaced enthusiasm for your husband’s brand?
An April 2026 Senate banking committee later cited reporting estimating that the two coins had cost retail investors approximately four point three billion dollars with roughly two million holders underwater. To which I say I guess that’s exactly what they deserve. Anybody who would invest in these people and expect that they actually care if the company succeeds for investors well, hasn’t been paying attention to anything Donald has done for the past fifty years. For Donald and his useless family members, all they care about is that they come out ahead. Nobody else matters.
A little more than a year after the meme coin was launched, Reuters analyzed four of the family’s main crypto ventures and calculated that as of the end of April 2026, the Trump family had made an estimated two point three billion dollars. Outside investors had lost approximately two point three billion dollars. And that includes losses on investments they have not yet sold, which means those losses could get worse. With the Trump meme coin alone, Reuters estimated that as of April 30th, buyers had lost more than seven hundred million dollars while the venture had generated approximately six hundred sixteen million dollars for Donald and his family.
One California software engineer profiled by Reuters invested two thousand dollars in the Trump meme coin in January 2025 after seeing Donald promote its launch. By the end of May 2026, her investment was worth less than one hundred twenty dollars.
If you’ve been paying attention to Donald’s so called business career, you would know that all he does for other people is lose them money. While thanks to banks and grifters and people trying to take advantage of him, he has become increasingly rich, especially since getting back into the Oval Office in January of 2025.
Politico reported on October 1st that Trump meme coin had fallen from nearly seventy five dollars per coin in January 2025 to just over two dollars. It isn’t just Trump meme coin. Reuters estimated outside investors had lost approximately six hundred forty million on World Liberty tokens, six hundred seventy five million on shares of Alt Five Sigma, and two hundred million on American Bitcoin. In other words, this does not seem like a very good investment for anybody other than the people selling this stuff.
But here’s what interests me most about all of this, and why this pattern has been going on for so long. Donald always comes out ahead in business ventures that are corrupt and/or failed. This goes way back to the 1970s when Donald and my grandfather Fred were sued by Nixon’s Department of Justice for their racist rental practices. They faced fines as much as one hundred million dollars. But instead of admitting that their rental practices were indeed racist, they hired the infamous attorney Roy Cohn, who countersued the DOJ for one hundred million dollars. The lawsuit settled and of course, Donald and my grandfather didn’t need to do anything to atone. They just had to sue back. And somehow that made it all go away.
It wasn’t until the late 1980s and early 1990s that Donald’s failures as a businessman and his corruption became obvious when he bankrupted all three of his Atlantic City casinos. Not an easy feat, by the way. But while his investors lost their shirts, he was able to stay afloat and in fact continued to enrich himself. How? Well, the banks believed that the best way to preserve their investment in him was to allow him to continue to live in the lifestyle to which he’d become accustomed, the lifestyle that people associated with his brand. So while he had to sell the Eastern Airline Shuttle, the Plaza Hotel, and his mega yacht, he was allowed to keep Mar-a-Lago and his triplex in Trump Tower.
The banks put him on a four hundred fifty thousand dollar a month allowance. So it is very easy to continue to get richer when the deck is entirely stacked in your favor. Nobody is willing to hold you accountable for bankrupting other people, and there is always somebody waiting to pick up the pieces and throw more money at you. Even as bad and failed a businessman as Donald Trump can get rich as long as those are the circumstances in which he’s allowed to operate.
And that’s exactly what’s happening now with the meme coins. Except this time, there are no bankers deciding it’s in their best interest to keep him afloat. This time it’s retail investors, millions of them, making the conscious decision to fund his wealth. This time it’s people who should know better, who have access to information, who can read Reuters reports and SEC filings and testimonies to Congress. This time it’s people making a choice to hand their money over to a man who has demonstrated over and over again that he will never, under any circumstances, care about anything other than enriching himself.
The Trump family doesn’t need anybody’s permission to keep getting richer. We’ve given them permission already. We allowed the system to be rigged in their favor for decades. Now they’re just operating within the system we created, openly and shamelessly. And we’re all picking up the tab.
Any dinner where Trump is the subject and host is creepy, weird and attended by degenerates.
And he's doing it on the anniversary of JFK's assassination.