Imagine that Joe Biden, just as he was assuming office, had started a new company with Hunter Biden and used his main social media account to recruit financial backers, then promised that the most generous among them would earn an invitation to a private dinner with him. Oh, and imagine that these investors were all kept secret from the public, so that we had no idea what kinds of possible conflicts of interest might arise. 

Take a minute, close your eyes. Let yourself see Jim Jordan’s face go purple in apoplexy, hear the moral thunder spewing out of Jesse Watters’s mouth, feel the shock (which would be wholly justified) of the New York Times editorial board as it expressed disbelief that the man representing the purported values and standards of the United States of America before the world would begin to think it was remotely OK to do such a thing. The media would be able to speak of nothing else for days. Maybe weeks.

Yet this and more is what Donald Trump just did, and unless you follow the news quite closely, it’s possible you’ve not even heard about it. Or if you have, it was probably in passing, one of those second-tier, "this is kind of interesting" headlines. But it’s a lot more than that. As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy noted Wednesday: "This isn’t Trump just being Trump. The Trump coin scam is the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. Not close." 

On May 14, TNR’s editor, Michael Tomasky, and staff writers Matt Ford, Timothy Noah, Tori Otten, and Greg Sargent will host the next in our series America in Crisis, live and livestreamed from the Atlas Performing Arts Center in D.C.

With the new administration in place, this event will bring together influential political commentators with TNR’s most engaged readers to explore what we can do to fight back against Trump’s antidemocratic rampage.

RSVP before it sells out:

Trump announced this week that the top 220 buyers of his $Trump (strump, as in strumpet) meme coin between now and mid-May will be invited to an exclusive dinner on May 22 ("a night to remember") at his golf club outside Washington, D.C. The Washington Post and other outlets have reported that in the days since the announcement, "buyers have poured tens of millions of dollars" into the coin; further, that the holders of 27 crypto wallets have acquired at least 100,000 coins apiece, "stakes worth about a million dollars each." Holders of crypto wallets are anonymous, if they want to be, so the identities of these people (or businesses or countries or sovereign wealth funds or whatever they might be) are unknown and will presumably remain so until the big dinner or, who knows, maybe for all time.

It’s also worth noting that Trump launched this meme coin just a few days before inauguration. Its value quickly shot up to around $75. It steadily declined through the first month of his presidency, and by early April, as Americans grew weary of a president who was tanking the economy, it had fallen to $7.14.

Mind you, a meme coin is a thing with no intrinsic value. It’s just some … thing that somebody decides to launch based on hype because they can get a bunch of suckers to invest in it. As Investopedia gingerly puts it: "Most meme coins are usually created without a use case other than being tradable and convertible." It should come as no surprise that some meme coins are tied to right-wing politics. Elon Musk named his Department of Government Efficiency after his favorite meme coin, dogecoin (which, in turn, was indeed named after an actual internet meme in which doge is slang for a Shiba Inu dog).

So, to go back to my opening analogy—this isn’t even like Joe and Hunter Biden starting a company from the White House. A company is a real thing. It makes a product or provides a service. It files papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It pays taxes. It employs people. Assuming that it’s a good corporate citizen and that it exists at least in part to solve some problem or offer the public some innovation, it contributes to the general welfare.

Not so a meme coin. It’s just a hustle. It may make certain investors rich, but it does the world no good whatsoever.

So stop and think about this. First, Trump, preparing for the presidency, purportedly busy thinking about how many millions of people he’s going to deport and how he’s going to bring "Jina" to its knees and how he’s going to hand eastern Ukraine to Putin and how he’s going to cut Meals on Wheels, for Chrissakes, takes time out from all that to stop and think: Now, how can I profit from returning to the White House? So he launches, naturally, the griftiest Christmas present ever.

It starts out great. Then its value drops by 90 percent. So in April, while he’s illegally deporting legal U.S. residents to El Salvador and roiling the world’s financial markets, he stops and takes the time to think: Hey, what happened with my meme coin? I had better figure out a way to goose this grift. So he comes up with this dinner. As well as showing just how tawdry his mind is, how he just automatically and intrinsically thinks it’s his right to make a buck from the presidency, it’s unspeakably corrupt. (One small silver lining here is that after peaking Wednesday at almost $15, it’s now under $12.)

Who knows who these "investors" are? Will we ever know? Inevitably, on May 22, people will be invited to that dinner. Will we know the guest list? Will the list be sanitized? Will a few Russian oligarchs be among the top 220 but send surrogates to keep their identity hidden?

This doesn’t create the "appearance" of corruption or set up the "potential" for conflict of interest. It is corruption, and it’s a standing conflict of interest. Patently, and historically. Chris Murphy is right: This is the most corrupt thing any president has ever done, by a mile.

What are the others? Watergate? It was awful in different ways, but of course Trump is worse than Richard Nixon in all those ways too. Teapot Dome? Please—a tiny little rigged contract, and it didn’t even involve Warren Harding directly, just his interior secretary. Credit Mobilier? Run-of-the-mill bribes by a railroad company, again not involving President Grant directly, just his vice president.

And yes, I’ve been thinking this week of the Lincoln Bedroom scandal. In 1995–96, the Clintons invited a lot of people to spend a night in the famous chamber. Many of them made large donations to the Democratic Party. It was unseemly. But it wasn’t illegal. And it certainly didn’t line the Clintons’ personal pockets. But if you were around at the time, you remember as I do the swollen outrage of Republicans about how relentlessly corrupt the Clintons were.

Today? Crickets.

Finally: Before we leave this topic, I want you to go to GetTrumpMemes.com and just look at those illustrations of Trump. There’s a big one in the middle of him with his fist raised, echoing the image from his attempted assassination. Then off to the right, there’s Trump seated at the head of a dining table.

In both, he looks about 50. The artist has airbrushed a good quarter-century off his face, in terms of jowl fat and wrinkles and accumulated orange pancake. And in the dominant, middle image … what do we think Trump’s waist size is, about 46, 48? This Trump is about a 34. Maybe even a svelte 32. It’s hysterically funny. These are probably the most creepily totalitarian images of Trump I’ve ever seen, and yes, I understand, that’s a big statement. But even Stalin’s visual hagiographers didn’t try to make him look skinny.

I digress. Let’s keep our eyes on the real prize here. This May 22 dinner is a high crime and misdemeanor. A president of the United States can’t use the office to enrich himself in this way, from potentially anonymous donors for whom he might do favors. This is as textbook as corruption gets.

New York Times and Washington Post, put your best investigative reporters on this and place their stories on your front pages. MSNBC, hammer on this—you haven’t been. Democrats, talk about this every day, several times a day. Do not let Trump’s sewer standards jade us. Make sure the people know.

Last week’s quiz: The sound that shook the world. A look at the history of the electric guitar.

1. The main things that make an electric guitar electric are those two or three metal bars that you see between the bottom of the neck and the bridge (the base of the strings). Those metal bars contain magnets and wire, and they convert the acoustic vibration into an electric signal. What are they called?

A. Converters

B. Signalers

C. Expressers

D. Pickups

Answer: D, pickups. I would have thought this was fairly widely known, in the way that people know, for example, that the buttons on brass instruments are called valves. But maybe nonmusical people don’t know that, either. 

2. These metal bars were first placed on a guitar in 1928, but it was 1932 before the world saw the first commercial production of an electric guitar. Who pioneered this?

A. C.F. Martin

B. Leo Fender

C. Orville Gibson

D. Alfred Rickenbacker

Answer: D, Mr. Rickenbacker. Martin made acoustic guitars, Gibson lived much earlier, and Fender came around a bit later. Here’s a photo of the thing and a brief history.

3. This guitar debuted in 1951 and became what was really the first broadly available and affordable electric guitar. Originally a staple mainly of country music players, it quickly became a rock and roll workhorse and is still wildly popular today.

A. Fender Telecaster

B. Epiphone Casino

C. Gibson SG

D. Gretsch Country Gentleman

Answer: A, the "Tele," as we call it (pronounced telly). I own a ’72 natural with white pick guard (here’s a photo of a ’74 in the same finish). When I bought it in the late 1970s (for $200 from a friend), it was a "CBS-era" Tele and thus frowned upon. Today, it’s vintage! I kinda quit playing it much a few years ago cuz I noticed my back was suddenly nudging up against 60, and the Telecaster is a very heavy guitar. But I keep it around, with only five strings on it (not the normal six) and tuned to Open G, which leads us to …

4. Jimi Hendrix was famous for playing a white Stratocaster. His first was given to him by a woman named Linda Keith, who stole it from her then fiancé and gave it to Jimi for a gig (she would go on to date Hendrix for a time). Who was this fiancé?

A. Dave Davies

B. Jeff Beck

C. Keith Richards

D. Derek Leckenby (lead guitarist, Herman’s Hermits)

Answer: C, Keith, the undisputed king of five-string, Open-G tuning. There’s a lot that’s funny about this story, including the fact that back in those early days, Linda apparently liked quaaludes and Keith disapproved! And by the way: Don’t laugh at Derek Leckenby—he was an excellent, and respected, guitarist, and died tragically young of one of those terrible diseases.

5. Match the guitarist to the axe with which he is most closely associated.

Answer: Clapton = Strat; Page = Les Paul (his double-neck guitar, which he used only on certain songs, was an SG); Cobain = Mustang (or an odd Mustang-Jaguar hybrid he often played); Berry = Gibson. 

6. Who is the greatest female guitar player of all time, according a 2023 survey by Far Out (U.K.) magazine?

A. Nancy Wilson

B. Sister Rosetta Tharpe

C. Bonnie Raitt

D. Nita Strauss (lead guitarist for Alice Cooper)

Answer: B, Tharpe. Obvious, to the initiated. Here’s the list. And here’s a little taste of Strauss shredding the "Poison" solo. She’s good!

On April 29, Norm Eisen and Jen Rubin of The Contrarian and Michael Tomasky of The New Republic will convene leading political, legal, and media minds for a major livestreamed event—assessing the authoritarian onslaught of Trump’s first 100 days.

This week’s quiz: Deuces wild. For no particular reason, a history of gaming and gambling.

1. Where and when were playing cards first invented?

A. China, ninth century

B. Persia, tenth century

C. Egypt, eleventh century

D. Ottoman Empire, twelfth century

2. Where was the modern 52-card deck with hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades developed?

A. England

B. Spain

C. Italy 

D. France

3. Imagine a printable dice template that you could fold into a hexahedron (a six-sided cube). It’s shaped like a cross—one face on top, three horizontal faces below it, and two faces below the three horizontal ones, stacked vertically. To get a die that follows the standard format, how many dots (or "pips") would you place on each face in order (top single face; next three horizontal, left to right; bottom two, descending)?

A. 6, 1, 2, 3, 5, 4

B. 5, 2, 6, 4, 3, 1

C. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 4

D. 3, 2, 1, 4, 5, 6

4. Rank these poker hands from highest to lowest: full house, straight, four of a kind, flush.

5. In what year did the Casino de Monte Carlo open its doors?

A. 1780

B. 1800

C. 1834

D. 1865

6. What is the world’s most gambling-addicted nation, measured by monetary loss per adult?

A. Australia

B. Russia

C. Japan

D. China

I’m not much of a gambler, honestly. In fact, I hate Las Vegas more than anywhere in the world. I used to think it’d be cool to go to Monte Carlo, wearing a tux of course, striding confidently toward the chemin de fer table like 007, but even that no longer interests me. Answers next week. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com. 

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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