Trump’s Crypto Dinner Guests Admit They’re Trying to Buy Him Off

Incredibly unsurprising news: The people who paid millions of dollars to get into Trump’s lavish cryptocurrency dinner did so to directly influence the president’s financial policy in their favor.

“I will definitely not hesitate to share my perspective,” Vincent Liu, CIO of Taiwanese-based crypto firm Kronos Research, who bought enough of Trump’s crypto to attend the dinner Thursday night, told The New York Times. “It’s great to see the current direction that everything’s going.”

“It’s kind of a fund-raiser” for Mr. Trump, Korean crypto executive Sangrok Oh and another dinner attendee, told the Times. “And he’ll always be good to his sponsors.”

The dinner was held at Trump’s private golf club in northern Virginia on Thursday evening for the top 220 holders of the president’s meme coin cryptocurrency—after an auction that brought in $147,586,796.41. Protesters lined the entrance to the building, chanting “Shame, shame, shame!” and holding up signs while attendees arrived.

The event was promoted as the “most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the world,” according to an email. While the top 220 buyers got into the gala, the top 25 buyers received a much more personal, “ultra-exclusive private VIP reception” and “Special VIP Tour” with Trump, allowing them unfettered access to the president.

There were also some other high-profile attendees there (with much smaller pockets than the likes of Liu and Oh). Embattled former NBA player and reality TV star Lamar Odom posted a video on X of himself walking into the event while boos and jeers rained down on him from the crowd.

“I’m just about to pass through security and officially walk into the Trump Gala.

Honestly … I’m fired up. Think about it—what meme coin has ever done this?” Odom wrote on X, plugging his own meme coin, as well. “$ODOM isn’t just a token, it’s taking the stage at a presidential gala tonight!”

Trump’s cryptocurrency has been widely condemned as a blatant conflict of interest that completely blurs the lines between executive power and private business.

“Donald Trump’s dinner is an orgy of corruption. That’s what this is all about,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said that evening. “Donald Trump is using the presidency of the United States to make himself richer through crypto, and he’s doing it right out there in plain sight. He is signaling to anyone who wants to ask for a special favor—and is willing to pay for it—exactly how to do that.

Crypto-investors anonymously shelled out a total $148 million to purchase access to Donald Trump, but all they got was a low-quality steak.

Guests at Trump’s supposedly “intimate” gala for the 220 top buyers of the $TRUMP memecoin gathered at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia Thursday night, hoping for a little facetime with the president. But they were left entirely unsatisfied.

Nicholas Pinto, a 25-year-old social media influencer who spent a whopping $360,000 on the president’s memecoin, told Fortune that he was distinctly underwhelmed by the affair.

Trump, rather than cozy up to his guests, gave an address to the room that was “pretty much like bullshit,” Pinto said. Most guests struggled to get any face time with the president, according to Pinto. The event’s host Caitlin Sinclair, an anchor at OANN, said that she didn’t even get a picture with the commander-in-chief, Pinto recalled.

Christoph Heuermann, who shared a series of photographs from the event on his Instagram page, wrote that Trump gave a brief 20-minute speech “and didn’t interact with the crowd other than enjoying being celebrated.”

Only the 25 biggest investors were given access to a small VIP reception with Trump. The rest were left with only their halibut or filet mignon.

During the banquet, Pinto texted Fortune to say that the food was “trash.”

“Walmart steak, man,” he wrote.

Guests reportedly included the coin’s top buyer Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire who founded the crypto platform Tron, and former Los Angeles Laker Lamar Odom. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that a list of attendees would not be made public because the president was attending the event off-the-clock—which doesn’t even begin to resolve the conflicts of interest issues at play for the president of the United States.

On average, each person had spent roughly $1.8 million on the president’s meme coin, in what many critics have called a blatant pay-for-access scheme.

Days after the president signed a bill focused on curbing revenge porn, Nancy Mace’s former political adviser has accused the South Carolina lawmaker of displaying nude photos taken by her ex-fiancé to extort two properties out of him.

In an April deposition tied to a Charleston County civil case, veteran strategist Wesley Donehue said that Mace intended “to use all the information that she found as leverage to gain 100 percent ownership” of homes the former couple had in Washington and South Carolina’s Isle of Palms.

During a House Oversight Committee hearing on Tuesday, Mace showcased what she described as her “naked silhouette” from a video taken by Patrick Bryant without her consent. Mace said that in 2023, she discovered a trove of hidden-camera nude images of women that she claimed were taken by Byrant, also without those women’s consent. Mace displayed some of the images of the other women in the hearing, though she said she had gotten permission from them to do so.

Citing the example of her ex-lover, Mace encouraged the committee to pass two pieces of legislation she introduced in February centered on further prohibiting “video voyeurism” and expanding a “civil right of action for victims.”

In a statement, Bryant denied Mace’s “false and outrageous claims,” specifying that he had not raped or harmed anyone and that he had “never hidden cameras.”

“My mistake was loving and trusting someone who later weaponized our relationship,” Bryant wrote.

“Nancy Mace made these claims only while standing in Congress, purportedly shielded by legal immunity,” the Charleston-area businessman continued. “If she believed them to be true and there was evidence to support her accusations, she would say them outside the chamber—away from her public role and protections and pursue them through proper legal channels. She has not done so, because she cannot.”

And Donehue—per an 81-page deposition—appeared squarely against Mace’s record of events.

“I don’t believe a word that comes out of Nancy Mace’s mouth about anything,” said Donehue, who claimed to have known Mace for years. Donehue further painted Mace as an individual keen to play the “victim card” in order to get what she wants. “And that has nothing to do with this specific incident. I just believe that Nancy Mace will say and do anything for personal and political gain.”

From Donehue’s perspective, the photos on Bryant’s phone became an issue when Mace discovered he had dating apps downloaded, prompting concerns that the entrepreneur was cheating on her.

“Nancy talks about her sex life in a way that I’ve never heard a client or a woman talk,” he continued. “It’s like every conversation would devolve into what’s going on in her sex life.”

A federal judge blocked Donald Trump’s administration from revoking Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students. 

In a brief filing Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Allison Burroughs granted Harvard’s request for a temporary restraining order preventing the Department of Homeland Security from revoking the university’s Student Exchange Visa Program certification. 

Harvard had filed a lawsuit earlier Friday seeking the order, following the DHS announcement from the previous day that the university “can no longer enroll foreign students and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.” International students make up about a quarter of Harvard’s student body.

Harvard, which has long been the target of the Trump administration, slammed the DHS’s  “unlawful and unwarranted action” in its Friday lawsuit, calling the move a “blatant violation” of the law.

In a separate ruling Thursday, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in California barred the government from changing international students’ legal status until cases challenging previous visa revocations are resolved. He said that the government’s actions had “wreaked havoc not only on the lives of Plaintiffs here but on similarly situated F-1 nonimmigrants across the United States and continues do so.”

The Trump administration sought to bar all international students on F- or J- nonimmigrant visas from enrolling in Harvard for the 2025–2026 academic year, including those already pursuing a degree at the school. In a statement, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem Noem claimed that the university had created an unsafe environment by failing to shutter pro-Palestinian speech, and alleged that they’d collaborated with the Chinese Communist Party.

Noem has claimed that Harvard can avoid the ban on future foreign student enrollment by agreeing to dox all of its current foreign students to the Trump administration. 

These international students have found themselves in the crosshairs of the government’s simultaneous crackdowns on immigration and free speech, as well as the president’s ongoing vendetta against the Ivy League institution.

This story has been updated.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is letting his glitchy Grok AI chatbot sift through potentially sensitive government information, according to an exclusive report from Reuters Friday.

One person familiar with the matter told Reuters that DOGE had begun using a customized version of Grok, a generative AI chatbot developed by xAI, which is owned by the billionaire bureaucrat, to do their work.

“They ask questions, get it to prepare reports, give data analysis,” the person told Reuters. Grok was apparently being used to move through masses of information more efficiently in the organization’s search for supposed waste, fraud, and abuse.

Two other people said that DOGE had pressed officials at the Department of Homeland Security to use Grok, despite the fact that it was not approved for use there. Grok’s use in the federal government raises significant concerns about Musk’s many conflicts of interest in his government work and business ventures, as the government would have to pay for access to use the AI chatbot, the sources said.

“This gives the appearance that DOGE is pressuring agencies to use software to enrich Musk and xAI, and not to the benefit of the American people,” said Richard Painter, ethics counsel to former Republican President George W. Bush and a University of Minnesota professor. Musk has been accused of using the State Department to boost Starlink in foreign countries and the Commerce Department to boost Tesla.

Reuters could not independently confirm claims that DHS employees had actually started using Grok, or whether they needed to pay for it. A Homeland Security spokesperson said that “DOGE hasn’t pushed any employees to use any particular tools or products.”

Reports that Grok is being used in the federal government raise other concerns as well, about DOGE’s compliance with privacy laws and its handling of sensitive data. xAi’s website said that it may monitor Grok users for “specific business purposes.”

Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit that advocates for digital privacy, told Reuters that DOGE using Grok was “about as serious a privacy threat as you get.”

Musk appears to maintain a disturbing control over Grok’s output. Recently, the AI chatbot began generating answers about white genocide—a nonissue that Musk is very passionate about—when asked unrelated queries.

In a strange appeal to a right-wing conception of masculinity, Representative Tim Burchett proclaimed that he does not drink any liquid out of straws, because he is a masculine man and straws are for feminine women.

“[Jesse] Watters says men should not drink out of straws in public, or at all,” a Fox News host told Burchett on Thursday, asking what the Republican representative thought.

“I don’t drink out of a straw, brother, that’s what the women in my house do,” Burchett responded.

Burchett was swiftly ridiculed online.

“Fellas, is it gay to drink out of a straw?” New York Representative Robert Garcia quipped. “Fox News always asking the tough questions.”

“What is it about these MAGA conservatives that they have to prove how manly they are all the time?” said one X user.

“Imagine your country’s on fire and Fox News is debating the gender politics of straws. Grown men on primetime TV clutching pearls over plastic tubes,” wrote another. “If masculinity is this fragile, maybe let it melt with the ice in their sad little cups.” Some simply posted uncaptioned pictures of President Trump and Burchett himself using straws.

This asinine idea that using a straw is unbecoming of a “real man” seemed to gain steam on the internet around 2015, when Esquire’s Jill Krasney and others proclaimed that “no self-respecting man consumes his libation with a straw.” But the trend was popularized by Fox News host Jesse Watters and his “rules for men.”

“I have rules for men, they’re just funny. They’re not that serious,” Watters said in March. “You don’t eat soup in public, you don’t cross your legs, and you don’t drink from a straw. And one of the reasons you don’t drink from a straw is the way your lips purse. It’s very effeminate.”

In 2023, Watters chided then-President Joe Biden for using a straw too.

“You know I recommend all men refrain from using straws. It’s unbecoming,” he said. “The way a man’s lips purse, the size of the straw is just too dainty, the way your fingers clasp on it.… No, come on. Straws are for women and little kids.”

Regardless of how serious Watters claims to be about his rules for men, there are quite a few poor souls out there pushing the same idea.

“Beloved, if you were unfortunate enough to be born to a single mother who didn’t teach you anything and ran your dad off then you probably don’t know this: Men do not drink from straws,” said the massively popular right-wing content creator Wranglerstar in a video titled “Everything is Falling Apart.”

This incredibly stupid talking point had been previously relegated to Watters and his right-wing acolytes in the depths of YouTube and TikTok. Now it’s getting airtime in the halls of Congress.

While House Republicans celebrated passing the president’s “big, beautiful” spending bill by a one-vote margin Thursday, caucus members in the upper chamber remained unimpressed.

Speaking with CNN’s Manu Raju later that day, South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham shot down some of the cuts as “not real,” arguing that the House had done next to nothing to actually bring down federal spending.

Even a $880 billion cut into Medicaid couldn’t offset the gargantuan price tag on extending Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which are estimated to add somewhere between $3.8 trillion and $5.3 trillion to the national debt. Those numbers have ruffled feathers among congressional budget hawks, who were under the impression that the Trump administration would be sizing down spending rather than beefing it up.

America’s national deficit is currently more than $36.8 trillion, as of the time of publishing.

“Some of the Freedom Caucus members are warning you guys not to water down any of their cuts, what do you say to them?” Raju asked.

Graham could only laugh.

“Well, you had your chance,” the lawmaker said with a chuckle. “Some of these cuts are not real. And we’re talking about over a decade—you know, if you do a trillion and a half, that’s like a percent and a half.”

“So don’t get high on our horse here that we’ve somehow made some major advancement of reducing spending because we didn’t,” Graham noted.

Several conservative senators have indicated they won’t vote for the bill if it includes a debt limit increase, including Senators Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, and Rick Scott. The growing coalition of budget-conscious naysayers is threatening enough to potentially keep the bill from reaching the president’s desk, as Republicans grapple with their narrow majority in the Senate.

The Trump administration doesn’t want you to trust independent analysis of their “big, beautiful” tax bill.

The bill—now headed to the Senate—proposes cutting upward of $880 billion from Medicaid in order to make a multitrillion-dollar tax cut extension for multimillionaires and corporations more palatable to the American public. Trump’s bill is estimated to add somewhere between $3.8 trillion and $5.3 trillion to the national debt.

But when pressed by Fox News Friday to explain the massive expenditure, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent simply brushed the numbers off.

“You’re referring to the [Congressional Budget Office] scoring, which is 10-year scoring and it’s D.C.-style scoring,” Bessent said, clearing his throat. “We think that we can both grow the economy and control the debt.”

“What’s important, Bill, is that the economy grows faster than the debt,” Bessent told Fox Host Bill Hemmer. “So what I would tell your viewers to focus on, is what I’m focused on, is what [former] Secretary [Janet] Yellen was focused on, is what is total debt to GDP.

“We can grow our way out of this. If we change the growth trajectory of the country, of the economy, then we will stabilize our finances and grow our way out of this,” Bessent added.

The CBO is a nonpartisan federal agency that provides prospective analytics to Congress. On Tuesday, a CBO report of the House’s reconciliation package found that—if passed—the bill would disproportionately aid the wealthiest among us, lowering household resources by 4 percent for the bottom 10 percent of America, while raising resources by 2 percent for the richest 10 percent of the country.

But America’s finances are not stabilizing, in no small part due to Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again tariff plan that has rattled U.S. markets. Last week, credit firm Moody’s was the last of the three major bond rating agencies to downgrade the nation’s score. Moody’s reported that it appears increasingly unlikely that the U.S. economy will be able to keep up with its rising debt and interest payments, throwing off what was once an unshakeable confidence in U.S. growth.

In the wake of the downgrade, Bessent once again urged investors to close their eyes and disregard the news, claiming that the lowered score was simply a “lagging indicator” of U.S. performance.

America’s national debt is currently more than $36.8 trillion, as of the time of publishing. Whether or not the deficit actually affects the economy is still in debate, but having investors believe in the health of the economy is critical.

“The government deficit isn’t a problem until investors think it is,” Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management, told Axios Monday. “And they’re increasingly telling us that the deficit is a problem.”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. inadvertently destroyed his own nominee for surgeon general by giving a rare, good piece of medical advice.  

During an interview with CNN’s Kaitlin Collins Thursday, Kennedy was asked to explain a remark he’d made that people should not take his medical advice. 

“Absolutely. People should not be taking medical advice from somebody who is not a physician,” Kennedy said. 

That’s not great news for Casey Means, the wellness influencer and author Donald Trump nominated at Kennedy’s suggestion to serve as the surgeon general. Means is not a practicing physician because she has no active medical license, and she never completed her physician residency.

Unaware of how ridiculous he sounded, Kennedy continued, muddling his point entirely. “And they should also be skeptical about any medical advice. They need to do their own research,” he said.

In one breath, Kennedy warned against taking advice from unproven sources and also urged Americans to question any actual advice they do get and seek out their own alternative, unproven medicines. As an anti-vaccine advocate, Kennedy has repeatedly championed alternative, unproven medicines. 

Harvard University is suing the Trump administration over its revocation of the school’s ability to enroll international students.

In a lawsuit filed on Friday in Boston, the university slammed the administration’s “unlawful and unwarranted action,” calling it a “blatant violation” of the law.

The school highlighted the over 6,800 visa holders from more than 100 countries that will be negatively impacted by the administration’s disdain for basic First Amendment principles.

“With the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the University and its mission,” Harvard said in the suit.

Harvard said it will also be seeking a temporary restraining order against the move.

The move comes one day after the Trump administration announced it is revoking Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, which would bar all international students on F- or J- nonimmigrant visas from enrolling in the university for the 2025–2026 academic year, including those already pursuing a degree at the school.

“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a press release full of propaganda on Thursday. “It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments. Harvard had plenty of opportunity to do the right thing. It refused. They have lost their Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification as a result of their failure to adhere to the law.”

Noem claims that Harvard can avoid the ban on future foreign student enrollment by simply doxxing all of its current foreign students to the Trump administration.