As President Donald Trump’s biggest memcoin buyers such as Tron founder Justin Sun bask in his attention over dinner on Thursday, Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups have arrayed a series of protests and complaint sessions to decry the president’s crypto event as fundamentally corrupt.
Trump will host his dinner for more than 200 of his leading memecoin investors, whose money will fill the coffers of the president’s own business entities. They’ve reportedly been invited to his capital-area golf course, the Trump National Golf Club Washington, D.C., outside of which the memecoin buyers may encounter protesters.
Some of the counter-programming for his dinner will start earlier in the day in front of the Capitol Building. At 12:45 p.m., Representative Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, will round up other lawmakers in front of the House steps to rail against Trump, accusing him of abusing his White House powers to “shamelessly promote and profit from a series of crypto ventures tied to himself and his family,” according to a notice about the event.
Waters will also introduce a new messaging bill “to block Trump’s memecoin and stop his crypto corruption, once and for all.” The legislation, which is unlikely to make headway in a Republican-majority Congress, would ban presidents, vice presidents, members of Congress and their families from “engaging in similar crypto crime.”
It’s the same type of ban that Democrats had been seeking to insert into crypto legislation, but Republicans have declined to let Trump-targeting language into the current digital assets bills, including the Senate stablecoin effort getting close to the finish line.
Later on Wednesday at 2:30 p.m., another press conference of Democratic lawmakers will feature Senators Chris Murphy and Elizabeth Warren, both of whom have been prominent in congressional criticism against Trump’s crypto actions. Murphy had introduced his own bill with a similar aim to Waters’, the Modern Emoluments and Malfeasance Enforcement (MEME) Act to stop federal officials from using their positions to profit from digital assets.
That event — also outside the Capitol — will additionally feature Senator Jeff Merkley, who also intends to join an evening protest right outside Trump’s golf course, hosted by progressive groups under the banner of Our Revolution. The message of the “America Is Not For Sale” rally is to push back on “a blatant example of political access being sold to the highest bidder,” according to the group.
The guest list for the memecoin dinner hasn’t been made public, but analysis of the buying of those coins suggest that the biggest spenders devoted millions for the privilege of joining the president at the event. The attendees’ anonymity is part of the problem, according to critics, who say that foreign buyers are gaining access to the president without the knowledge of the public.
Debate over the president’s crypto ties temporarily delayed progress on the U.S. stablecoin legislation meant to set up rules for domestic issuers, but the bill got back on track this week to clear an important procedural hurdle in the Senate on Monday.
Trump’s team has downplayed accusations of corruption. White House official Bo Hines said last week at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2025 conference in Toronto that the Trump family’s crypto ventures do not pose conflicts of interest, and they have “the right to engage in capital markets.”
Read More: Justin Sun Emerges as Donald Trump Memecoin’s Top Holder With $21.9M Stake
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