White House officials have argued the dinner poses no conflict of interest because the president's assets are in a blind trust managed by his adult sons.

President Donald Trump dined with the top purchasers of his meme coin at a black-tie gala Thursday night, demonstrating his willingness to cross what was once seen as an ethical red line: profiting off the presidency while in office.

Presidents of both parties have long granted special access to wealthy political donors and participated in private dinners to raise funds for their parties or their own campaigns. But campaign money comes with legal restraints, and donors must disclose donations to political candidates or committees.

Trump’s crypto venture is different: He and his family profit personally when people buy his meme coin, and crypto transactions are often shrouded in anonymity. The venture has collected millions of dollars in crypto transaction fees from the attendees eager to gain access to Trump, who has described himself as the “crypto president.”

Since the meme coin’s debut in January, Trump-affiliated businesses have received $312 million from crypto sales and $43 million in total fees, according to a Washington Post analysis of data through last week. Crypto wallets linked to Trump and his partners have earned about $3 million in transaction fees charged to coin buyers since the dinner was announced last month, The Post’s analysis found.

The White House has argued the dinner poses no conflict of interest because the president’s assets are in a blind trust managed by his adult sons. Asked whether the administration would commit to releasing a list of the dinner attendees, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday she would “raise that question” internally. Leavitt argued that the event “is not a White House dinner” and that “the president is attending it in his personal time.”

The Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun, former National Basketball Association player Lamar Odom and a crypto investor known as “Ogle” are among the top 220 buyers of the meme coin who qualified to attend the Thursday dinner at Trump’s golf club in Virginia. Sun, who had been under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission over 2023 allegations that he had tried to manipulate markets, invested millions in one of Trump’s other crypto ventures after the November election. In February, shortly after Trump took office, the SEC asked a court to halt the case against the crypto baron. Sun did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

Trump has spent his entire political career brushing off accusations that he is leveraging the office of the presidency for personal gain. But as the Trump family’s business empire has evolved from a hotel and real estate conglomerate to include a portfolio of social media and crypto businesses, ethics experts and Democrats have argued that Trump is financially benefiting from his office more openly than he did even during his norm-shattering first term in the White House.

“If you just focus on the money getting to the president himself, Trump stands alone,” said Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration.

Presidents and vice presidents are exempt from the ethics laws that prohibit Cabinet secretaries and other government employees from profiting off their offices. If held by another government employee, the dinner would probably violate those rules, said Don Fox, former general counsel for the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. In the future, Congress may consider changing the law so it applies to the president in light of Trump’s business activities while in office, Fox said.

“We’re decades removed from when people were concerned about whether Jimmy Carter was still going to run his peanut farm,” Fox said. “President Trump is taking every opportunity to monetize the presidency in ways that we could never imagine.”

Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, told The Post that Trump acts only in the best interests of the public.

“The President is working to secure GOOD deals for the American people, not for himself,” she said.

When Marine One landed at Trump National Golf Course in Sterling for the event Thursday night, about 100 protesters had gathered to protest the dinner. They lined the streets holding signs that said “No Kings No Corrupt Fool” and “America is not for sale,” and some were yelling, “Shame.”

After Trump landed, he commented on “what a nice place” his golf club in Virginia is.

“Did you get to see the helicopter?” he said after he landed at the course on Marine One, according to a video viewed by The Post.

Although White House officials insisted that Trump was attending the dinner on his “personal time,” taxpayers were nevertheless responsible for footing the bill for his travel to and from the event. Presidents rely on transportation like Marine One because of security protocols, but the trip underscores how difficult it is for Trump to separate the presidency from his businesses.

“He’s really never not in an official capacity,” said Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel for the watchdog group State Democracy Defenders Action and a former White House associate counsel under President Barack Obama. “Because he’s president, he always has to use special vehicles that he wouldn’t have access to, he wouldn’t have access to Marine One if he wasn’t president.”

Taxpayers typically pay for presidents’ personal travel, including their weekend trips to destinations such as Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, or Palm Beach, Florida. But there is no obvious precedent for a president flying in Marine One to a private event from which he and his family businesses are directly profiting.

“This is pathetic, transparent selective outrage because the Post is constantly pining for new ways to push fake news against President Trump,” Kelly said.

A few of the dinner invitees, whom The Post identified based off social media posts and indicators on the crypto transaction log known as the blockchain, said they saw the dinner as a chance to lobby Trump on crypto rules they thought could benefit their businesses.

The Trump administration has already reversed many of the Biden administration’s attempts to regulate the crypto industry, the Senate this week advanced cryptocurrency legislation favored by the industry, and the SEC has decreased its enforcement activity in crypto since Trump took office. Top Justice Department officials last month also directed prosecutors to back off investigating certain crypto crimes.

Democrats see Trump’s business entanglements and conflicts of interest as a line of political attack. On Wednesday, Rep. Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, introduced a bill that would prevent the president, the vice president, lawmakers and their immediate families from owning a proportion of a digital asset that would allow them to unilaterally make changes to the asset.

“Nowhere is Trump’s blatant disregard and disrespect for the rule of law more apparent than in the way he has exploited the office of the Presidency to promote shady, fraudulent crypto ventures that hold no real value, and serve no true purpose other than to pad his pockets,” Waters (California) said in a statement Thursday.

Rep. Sean Casten (D-Illinois) on Thursday called on the Justice Department to investigate whether the dinner violates federal bribery laws or the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which prohibits federal officeholders from accepting gifts, benefits or titles from foreign governments without the consent of Congress.

It’s not possible to track whether agents of foreign governments or sovereign wealth funds are among the buyers of the meme coin. A Post analysis found the top donors included 28 “ghost wallets” that are virtually untraceable.

The Wall Street Journal’s conservative-leaning editorial board raised a similar concern this week, saying the event “creates the risk of ethical conflicts.”

Meme coins are novelty digital currencies, often named for online jokes, that tend to show wild swings in price and “have limited or no use or functionality,” the SEC said in February. Years before announcing his meme coin in January and launching a company called World Liberty Financial last year, Trump had said cryptocurrencies seem “like a scam” and have values that are “based on thin air.”

An affiliate of Trump’s family business, the Trump Organization, operates the coin alongside a Delaware-registered company called Fight Fight Fight, run by longtime Trump ally Bill Zanker. Together, the two groups own 80 percent of the 1 billion Trump coins. The Trump company and Zanker did not respond to requests for comment.

The contest to attend the crypto dinner ran from April 23 to May 12, and it was not immediately clear how much the meme coin buyers paid to attend the event. The top 25 on an online leader board set up by the Trump-affiliated business to rank their spending hold a total of $140 million in Trump coins.

Sun disclosed on X that he is the top buyer on the leader board. HTX, a Chinese crypto exchange advised by Sun, celebrated the event in a post showing two computer-generated cartoons of Sun and Trump toasting with glasses of champagne.

Sun’s entry on the leader board shows that he holds more than $21 million in Trump coins. Sun, the founder of the crypto platform Tron, also invested $75 million in World Liberty Financial after Trump won the election. He sat with Trump’s son Eric onstage at a recent crypto event in Dubai.

The dinner’s invitees probably include many foreign spenders who would otherwise be legally forbidden from donating to U.S. political candidates. Roughly half of the top 220 Trump meme coin holders, and 19 of the top 25, have received coins from crypto exchanges such as Binance that claim to reject customers from the United States, The Post analysis found.

Organizers of the gala dinner Thursday night said all invitees would have to clear background checks and could not bring in cameras, backpacks or recording devices. They did not disclose who would attend the dinner, and many of the coin holders on the leader board are anonymous. The leader board identifies holders only by the address of their crypto wallet and a four-letter code name, in the style of an arcade game’s high-score list.

The top 25 spenders, who each had to acquire millions of dollars’ worth of Trump coins to qualify, were invited to an “ultraexclusive private VIP reception” with Trump. The contest’s original promotion promised them a tour of the White House, but the contest website recently has not specified where the tour will occur.

One of the top spenders, a Singapore-based crypto collective calling itself MemeCore, told its Discord followers that it would be hosting a 10 p.m. after-party following the dinner at an undisclosed location in Washington. “With ONLY INVITED elites, MemeCore is going to “Make MeCo Great Again”!!” the group said in a post.

Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Thursday that it “is absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency.”