The BIG reason people don't care about this Trump crypto scam 🤷‍♂️

PLUS: Joe Biden becomes an issue in CA-Gov 🤦

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1. A scandal in plain sight

(Getty Images/ NurPhoto)

Tonight at his Virginia golf club, Donald Trump — aka the president of the United States — will host the 200 or so of the biggest owners of a collectible memecoin with his image on it. The top 25 investors in the Trumpcoin will get to attend a VIP gathering with the president before the dinner.

“The most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the World,” reads the website for the dinner. “Only for the TOP 220$TRUMP Meme Coin Holders. President Donald J. Trump is Known as the ‘Crypto President!’ At this Intimate Private Dinner, Hear First-Hand President Trump Talk about the Future of Crypto.”

(Sidebar: Such weird capitalization!)

Just to be totally clear about what is happening here: Access to the president of the United States is being sold to people who buy a collectible coin. While Trump himself doesn’t directly profit from the sales of the coins — it all happens on an exchange market — he (and those close to him) will clearly benefit from this.

As Politico noted Thursday morning: “About 80 percent of $TRUMP coins are held by Trump Organization affiliates, and so in theory if their value soars those holdings should become more valuable.”

And we are talking about a MASSIVE amount of money. Here’s NBC on that:

“In total, the winners spent $394 million on Trump’s official cryptocurrency, [a blockchain analytics company called] Nansen found, though some have sold portions of or all of their holdings since the contest ended. The amount varied significantly by spender, with the top seven winners each spending more than $10 million and the bottom 24 each spending less than $100,000. A third of the winners — 67 of them — spent more than a million dollars, the research shows. The average winner spent $1,788,994.42.”

If you think these folks are spending nearly $2 million EACH to have dinner with the president just because it’s a cool experience, you are, well, hopelessly naive. They are literally paying for face time, for the chance to talk to the president, the chance to make the case for their particular business or idea or whatever.

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All of which makes White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s defense of the dinner utterly laughable.

“I have also stated previously from this podium that the president is abiding by all conflict of interest laws that are applicable to the president,” she said on Thursday. “And I think everybody, the American public, believe it's absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency.”

I mean, this is grift right in plain sight. And yet, in a quick scan of the major media homepages this afternoon — CNN, WaPo, New York Times — I couldn’t find a word about it. It was nowhere to be seen on the Google Trends page either.

Why not?

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