Democratic U.S. senator for Georgia Jon Ossoff said President Donald Trump’s invitation to top meme coin holders constitutes an “impeachable offense.” Answering a question from a town hall meeting attendee on Friday, Ossoff said:
“He is granting audiences to people who purchase the memecoin that directly enriches him.”
Ossoff was referring to the gala dinner invite announced on Wednesday for the 220 top holders of the Trump memecoin.
Ossoff said that the move constitutes “selling access for what are effectively payments” made “directly” to Trump. Therefore, it undeniably “rises to the level of an impeachable offense, and the reality is that that’s just one of many,” he added.
Only three U.S. Presidents have been impeached by Congress. President Trump was impeached twice during his first term—the only President to have faced two impeachments.
The impeachment process requires the House of Representatives to launch a formal impeachment inquiry. If the House Judiciary Committee approves, articles of impeachment go to the full House, where a simple majority vote can impeach the president. However, removal from office requires a two-thirds guilty vote in a Senate trial.
Trump was acquitted both times in his Senate trials following his impeachments. No U.S. president has ever been removed from office.
Therefore, Ossoff said that he is working on securing votes for impeachment, but with Republicans controlling the Senate, it’s a difficult task.
How Trump stands to gain from the invite to memecoin holders
According to the official website for Trump’s memecoins, the top 220 holders of $TRUMP will be invited to attend a gala dinner with the president on May 22. The dinner, advertised as the “most exclusive invitation in the world,” will be held at Trump’s Private, Members-Only Club in Washington, D.C..
The top 25 $TRUMP holders will also gain access to an “Exclusive Reception” before the dinner party, along with a VIP tour. Trump will be talking about the “Future of Crypto” at the dinner, the website says.
About 80% of the supply of the Official Trump memecoin, launched on Jan. 17, is owned by two companies: CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC. Both companies are part of a conglomerate owned by Trump.
According to the tokenomics, the above Trump-affiliated companies provided 10% of the supply to the liquidity pool. This means that these companies act as market makers, ensuring liquidity and fulfilling trades that come in. For this service, they charge a fee between 0.1% and 10% of each trade, depending on market demand.
Therefore, Trump indirectly benefits more from trading volume than from the price of his memecoin. Nathan van der Heyden, the head of business development at crypto firm Aragon, told Wired:
“If you have a coin and you control the market making and the fees generated, what you care about is volume and price movement, not price itself.”
In February, Reuters reported that the Trump-associated entities earned between $86 million and $100 million in trading fees by Jan. 30. The price of Trump, which reached a peak of around $75 on Jan. 19, had declined by 64% to around $27 during the same period. This meant that Trump-related companies earned huge fees while small traders lost money.
Van der Heyden said:
“The optics of profiting from selling your own coin are terrible, while profiting from the market making is opaque enough to protect your reputation.”
$TRUMP memecoin trading frenzy following dinner invite
The opportunity to have dinner with the President of the U.S. is a powerful motive to buy the memecoin. Traders can register to gain access to an hourly-updated leaderboard to see their ranks, while their identities remain hidden behind their wallet addresses.
The dinner invite set off a $TRUMP trading frenzy on Wednesday, pushing the price up by over 50% to approximately $14.50, according to CryptoSlate data. At the time of writing, the memecoin was trading at $15.72, still down by more than 79% from its all-time high.
As van der Heyden said, the Trump-affiliated entities behind the memecoin generate income from trading fees. The contributors to the $TRUMP liquidity pool, of which the Trump-related companies are the biggest, collected $1.6 million in fees in the 24 hours following Trump’s dinner announcement, according to Wired.
The future of the $TRUMP price
Blockchain analytics firm Nansen believes, smart money traders, or experienced traders with a track record of profitability, used the price surge on Wednesday to exit their positions from $TRUMP. In fact, “more people took the opportunity to offload their Trump tokens than new buyers came in,” Nansen said, adding:
“There still appears to be some interest [in trading $TRUMP] — either A) to secure the dinner ticket, or B) to capitalize on price volatility.”
However, the long-term prospects of the $TRUMP price are grim, with crypto analyst Noelle Acheson telling Wired that a “slump” in price is “very likely.”
Trump’s invitation has sparked widespread criticism
Ossoff is not alone in criticizing Trump’s dinner invite to his memecoin holders. Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut wrote on X:
“The Trump coin scam is the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done.”
Many believe that if Trump benefits from his policies and decisions financially, there is a conflict of interest. Some have pointed out that the invite could be used by individuals trying to get access to Trump. Tony Carrk, U.S. executive director at Accountable.US, a non-partisan advocacy group, said in a statement:
“The President is openly inviting investors to have a bidding war over who can buy the most access to him while he laughs all the way to the bank.”
Carrk added that Trump’s invite clearly indicates that he is abusing his position in office to put money in his own pocket.
Earlier this week, senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff sent a letter urging the U.S. Office of Government Ethics to launch an “urgent inquiry” into Trump’s dinner announcement. They wrote that the dinner invitation poses a “severe risk” that Trump and others could be engaging in “‘pay to play’ corruption.”
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