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A cutout of President Donald Trump holding a bitcoin token at the Moonshot booth during the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Bridget Bennett / Bloomberg via Getty Images Crypto Trump's crypto complicates Las Vegas wedding between MAGA and bitcoin At the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas, attendees questioned the effects of Trump's meme coin.

A cutout of President Donald Trump holding a bitcoin token at the Moonshot booth during the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Bridget Bennett / Bloomberg via Getty Images Crypto Trump's crypto complicates Las Vegas wedding between MAGA and bitcoin At the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas, attendees questioned the effects of Trump's meme coin.

NBC News31-05-2025
May 31, 2025, 7:19 AM EDT
By David Ingram
LAS VEGAS — At bitcoin's biggest event of the year, the Trump administration was omnipresent. Vice President JD Vance was the keynote speaker at the Bitcoin 2025 conference Wednesday, President Donald Trump's sons Eric and Donald Jr. appeared on multiple panels, and a delegation of White House advisers including crypto czar David Sacks praised crypto as the future of technology.
The crypto community is used to being treated with skepticism and scorn from many politicians and lawmakers. But a warm embrace from the Trump White House still hasn't erased some crypto investors' skepticism.
As Trump has been loosening government oversight and regulations around cryptocurrency, he has also waded into his own crypto project: the $TRUMP coin. Earlier in May, Trump hosted a private dinner at his Washington, D.C.-area golf club for top $TRUMP coin buyers, who on average spent more than $1 million per seat and sparked widespread concern about opportunities for influence-buying.
The $TRUMP coin is what industry professionals call a meme coin — meaning it offers little technical innovation or practical use and that its value is extremely volatile, relying on cultural cachet and symbolism.
To many serious investors in bitcoin or other established cryptocurrencies, meme coins are seen as a hazard to the long-term success of crypto. On the conference floor, some bitcoin holders predicted that crypto novices would lose money on the $TRUMP coin, hurting the reputation of the entire industry. While many attendees liked Trump's crypto policies, they weren't sold on his coin.
'A lot of them will get burned to leave and never come back — which I think is a terrible outcome, and I don't like it,' said Seth for Privacy, the vice president of crypto wallet software company Cake Wallet. The host of a privacy podcast, he declined to share his last name and is known online as Seth for Privacy.
'Obviously, the best-case scenario would be none of that stuff exists,' he said of meme coins. He said he still hopes that $TRUMP coin and others like it could be an 'on-ramp' to bitcoin.
More than 67,000 buyers of the Trump meme coin have acquired it with debit cards, a likely sign that they were crypto neophytes, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.
Bitcoin investor Ryan Nichols, who traveled to the Bitcoin 2025 conference from Austin, Texas, said he's a Trump fan but wouldn't touch Trump's digital currency.
'I love Trump. I really want to see what he does to improve this country. But at the same time, I don't think his coin is going to be much better than the Hawk Tuah coin,' he said, referring to a meme coin that crashed in December and is now the subject of lawsuits.
'I think it will continue to be a pretty good investment for a few more months at most, and then probably drop,' he said.
The Trump Organization and the website administrators of gettrumpmemes.com, where the meme token is for sale, did not respond to requests for comment Friday.
The White House declined to comment, saying in an email, 'The $TRUMP meme coin has nothing to do with the White House!'
The price of the $TRUMP coin fluctuates. It sold for less than $1 a coin on Jan. 17, the night Trump announced it with a post on X. Within two days, it soared past $70, according to data from research site CoinGecko. Its value plunged after Trump's inauguration and has since bounced in a range from about $8 to $16 a coin. On Friday, it was trading at around $11, with a total market capitalization of $2.2 billion, according to CoinGecko.
First lady Melania Trump launched a meme coin of her own, called $MELANIA, also in January. Its price has cratered from more than $13 a coin to $0.32 as of Friday, according to CoinGecko.
Two Trump-affiliated companies own 80% of the $TRUMP coin project. While their ability to sell is restricted in the short term, the creators get a fee for every trade. Those fees have added up to more than $324 million since January, according to the research firm Chainalysis. The amount going to Trump personally is not known.
Another conference attendee, Edan Yago, a co-founder of the startup BitcoinOS, called the $TRUMP coin a form of legal corruption and not a good use of the underlying technology.
'Trump has discovered that he can issue a token and have people buy that token. Given our current legal system, it's all fine, and so there's new forms of graft and new forms of corruption that have come part and parcel with this new technology,' he said in an interview at the conference.
He compared meme coins to brothels on the edge of a gold rush. 'You always have this happen whenever there's massive growth,' he said.
Audrey Geiger, another bitcoin investor, said she voted for Trump and likes that he has loosened regulations on cryptocurrency, but she said she wouldn't buy the $TRUMP coin.
'Never touched the stuff,' she said. 'I just ignore that. It's all noise. It's gambling.'
The comments are a sign of a tension in the marriage between the MAGA and crypto movements. The two groups formed an alliance last year, when Trump was seeking support for his return to the White House and the crypto industry was looking for changes in federal policy.
Trump had previously been a harsh critic of cryptocurrency, saying in 2021 that it 'seems like a scam,' but he flipped in the following years. He spoke at last year's bitcoin conference, made a series of promises to support crypto in office and now calls himself 'the crypto president.'
Trump has made aggressive moves to deregulate the cryptocurrency industry and has vowed to launch a government-owned ' strategic reserve ' of digital currency. Fueled in part by those actions, bitcoin soared to a record high of more than $111,000 in May.
'As soon as he won the election, that set in stone that he was the face of crypto for at least the next four years,' Nichols said.
Trump's coin has been widely criticized, with government ethics experts and Democratic politicians decrying it as a breach of presidential norms and a vector for possible attempts at influence-buying. Some Republican lawmakers said Trump's dinner with $TRUMP coin owners made them uncomfortable.
Jason Jisa, who attended the Bitcoin 2025 conference as a vendor selling Trump-themed merchandise, said he owns bitcoin but not Trump's coin. Wearing a gold- and silver-colored sequin jacket, he said the meme coin has left him stumped.
'It's something we're all paying attention to, trying to figure it out, right? It's something new,' he said.
New Hampshire state Rep. Keith Ammon, a Republican, spoke onstage at the conference about his role in creating his state's pathbreaking cryptocurrency reserve. In an interview, he said Trump's coin shouldn't be part of such a reserve fund, which under New Hampshire law is limited to digital assets with a market capitalization of over $500 billion.
'A meme coin is like a casino chip: You might get lucky on it, but it's not a long-term store of value. It's a Skee-Ball token,' he said. By contrast, he said he believes bitcoin 'is the digital version of the bar of gold.'
But even as many bitcoin enthusiasts expressed frustration with Trump's meme coin, none of the conference attendees interviewed by NBC News suggested there was anything to be done about it other than to try to persuade Trump to back off. They all said they oppose federal regulation of cryptocurrency, preferring to let meme coin buyers beware.
Seth for Privacy said the community needs to 'take the good with the bad.'
'If you could limit what cryptocurrencies people could launch or what meme coins could exist, necessarily you could limit what freedom use cases could exist with these things as well,' he said.
At the three-day conference at the Venetian resort and casino, Trump's name, likeness and slogans were everywhere: on artwork for sale, on hats and clothing and on the lips of speakers. A Trump look-alike roamed the expo floor.
And onstage, speakers reinforced the mutual benefits of the MAGA-crypto marriage. They praised Trump's overhaul of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which previously classified many digital tokens as securities under a 1933 law. And they extolled Trump's pardon of Ross Ulbricht, who in 2015 was sentenced to life in prison for running the dark web marketplace Silk Road. Prosecutors had blamed Silk Road for six drug overdose deaths, while Trump called the sentence too harsh.
The White House dispatched a cadre of advisers to speak at the conference, an unusual show of force from the U.S. government at an event that's explicitly anti-government. Sacks, the White House czar for crypto and artificial intelligence, said onstage that the Trump administration had already delivered much of what the industry had on its wish list, and he solicited ideas from the audience about what more the administration could do for crypto.
'I think by August, we might have achieved the crypto agenda in Washington,' Sacks said onstage Tuesday. 'What would you guys like to see? What else is on your wish list?"
Crypto booster Tyler Winklevoss, onstage with Sacks, said the U.S. government should acquire more bitcoin, prompting applause from the audience.
Don Jr. and Eric Trump predicted at the conference that bitcoin's price would keep rising to record highs. And Vance, who said he still owns bitcoin that he's held for years, urged conference attendees to get involved in politics including the 2026 midterm elections, or else face a potential crackdown by crypto skeptics.
'Don't ignore politics, because I guarantee you, my friends, politics is not going to ignore this community,' Vance said.
Panel moderators did not raise the subject of the $TRUMP meme coin onstage with Sacks, the Trump brothers or others from Trump world. The subject appeared not to come up at all in the conference's official programming, even though many attendees had closely followed news about the coin with concern.
Some bitcoin holders said that the depth of the Trump-crypto alliance made them a little uncomfortable. They noted that bitcoin was invented in 2008 to be independent of any government or other central authority.
'The people that are in politics are kind of the bandwagoners,' said Dustin Lee, a conference attendee who said he's been working in crypto for eight years and has his own meme coin, called Quai Boss. He said he was OK with the politicians' presence, though. 'We need the stragglers to get into the space, to bring on the rest of the people,' he said.
Geiger said that although she likes Trump and his policies, she's still pessimistic in general about politicians and their intentions toward bitcoin.
'I don't want to be blindsided. I don't want to be like, 'Oh, everything's all right now, because the orange guy won.' It's not that. Some of the things are moving slowly in a direction I love. But on the whole, politicians are gonna politician. They're gonna do their thing.'
David Ingram
David Ingram is a tech reporter for NBC News.
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Trump's cynical bluster has echoes of Vietnam
Trump's cynical bluster has echoes of Vietnam

Times

time12 minutes ago

  • Times

Trump's cynical bluster has echoes of Vietnam

In Anchorage on Friday, the president of the United States was confronted with the truth of an old superpower adage: it is easier to bully allies than to bend enemies. Since January, Donald Trump has enjoyed remarkable success in causing formerly friendly countries to submit without retaliation to his tariffs and insults. They have thus far preferred this course to an escalation of hostilities — and hostilities are what tariffs represent — with the most powerful nation on earth. America has become widely disliked and feared, especially in Europe and Canada. Most national leaders nonetheless continue to abase themselves before Trump, though Sir Keir Starmer may already regret his gushingly enthusiastic weekend remarks about the Alaska summit. Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, is an utterly different proposition. He is pursuing a nationalist agenda, to the point of obsession. He has no interest in compromise over Ukraine. He is bent upon victory. He seeks to recreate what some would call a sphere of influence but which we should recognise as a sphere of coercion, extending from Georgia through Ukraine and Belarus, and thereafter beyond. • Putin demands Ukraine surrender the Donbas as price of peace He is convinced that he can achieve this because he continues to command support among his own people. Sanctions are porous and his armed forces are slowly grinding down Ukraine. Europe is weak — incapable of arming Volodymyr Zelensky if the US quits. Putin believes that Trump will give him what he wants. The evidence from Friday's summit suggests that he is right. The president cares nothing for Zelensky and his country but respects the master of the Kremlin. He likes dictators and clings to hopes of prising Russia apart from China, which he views as the only adversary that should matter to Americans. Incomprehensible though it seems to us, he is more eager to build a relationship with Putin than to stay friends with Europe. A precedent for Trump's clumsy and cynical attempts to end the war lies in America's diplomatic efforts to disengage from Vietnam, half a century ago. President Lyndon Johnson initiated talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris in 1968. These got nowhere, for the same reason that olive branches are wasted on Putin. Hanoi was interested only in victory. Meanwhile, just as Zelensky is cut out of Trump's conversations with the Russians, so during the Indochina wars no South Vietnamese was invited to attend a significant White House policy meeting, nor indeed the Paris peace talks. Trump should never have attempted a bilateral with Putin because he is too verbally incontinent to negotiate rationally with an iceman such as Putin. Henry Kissinger, though incomparably cleverer, suffered constant frustrations when he became US emissary facing the North Vietnamese in Paris. Only in October 1972, weeks before a presidential election in which Richard Nixon faced the Democrat George McGovern, did Kissinger finally agree draft terms with the communist diplomat Le Duc Tho. When he arrived back in Washington, he strode into the White House bursting with excitement. 'The deal we've got, Mr President,' he was taped telling his employer, 'is so far better than anything we dreamt of. I mean, it will absolutely, totally, wipe out McGovern.' • We are no closer to peace, say Ukrainian refugees in Britain That remark did no service to Kissinger's reputation, because it made explicit that he viewed escape from Vietnam principally as a partisan political coup. He told Nixon that, while the agreement could be billed as 'peace', it would empower Hanoi to seize the South after a decent interval. Eighteen months should be enough, said Kissinger: 'If we settle it, say, this October, by January '74 no one will give a damn.' Nixon was so delighted that at lunch he invited his surrender broker to share a Lafite Rothschild 1957, such as the president customarily indulged alone, serving Californian red to the help. A deal was finally signed in Paris in January 1973. The Americans went home. Two years later I was among the unhappy eyewitnesses as Hanoi's army swept south to Saigon. Vietnam was, of course, a war in which the US had become directly and bloodily involved, unlike Ukraine, where it is merely arming a sovereign, West-leaning state to defend itself. What the two conflicts have in common, however, is that by 1973 Nixon's nation desperately wanted out of Indochina; in 2025, only a minority of Americans care a fig for Ukraine. Trump has not yet borrowed Neville Chamberlain's 1938 line about Czechoslovakia — 'a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing' — but his vice-president JD Vance has come close. Matthew Whitaker, the US ambassador to Nato, told CNN last week that 'no big chunks' of Ukrainian territory would be 'just given' to Russia 'that haven't been fought for or earned on the battlefield'. That remark should send a shiver through every advocate of freedom, every opponent of permitting brute force to determine outcomes. The signature on Nixon's Vietnam peace deal was delayed for almost four months, chiefly by the resistance of the South's president, Nguyen Van Thieu. Nixon bullied him into acquiescence at a meeting during which he shouted: 'Without aid, you're finished! Understand?' Yes, the wretched Vietnamese was obliged to understand. That nasty conversation in the Oval Office has a contemporary resonance, does it not? Without American aid Ukraine, too, is finished. Kissinger shamelessly accepted a half-share of a Nobel peace prize which Le Duc Tho, his interlocutor, had the integrity to reject. Trump today makes plain his own ambition to secure this honour, plausibly for a similar shoddy betrayal, though Ukraine is an incomparably worthier cause than was South Vietnam. On Monday the president is expected to tell Zelensky, and the European leaders whom he has also summoned to make complicit in Ukraine's future, that to halt the Russian rape of his country he must surrender the east, renounce hopes of joining Nato or the EU and sign a deal that includes no credible security guarantee. Putin is determined to pull every string of a future puppet government in Kyiv. It is not too late for Donald Trump to change course, and we should cling to hopes that he will do so. The only rightful, statesmanlike response to Putin's murderous obduracy is for the US to boost arms supplies to Ukraine and escalate sanctions against Russia. If, instead, the president demands that Zelensky rolls over, we shall have cause to despair of his ever fulfilling the traditional role of successive US presidents, as the West's principal standard-bearers for freedom and justice. Next month's presidential state visit to London seems an ever more cringe-making prospect. There is malicious gossip in Washington that on the plane to Anchorage a triumphalist Putin and his acolytes ate chicken Kyiv. It will be a historic tragedy if Trump proves to have served it to them.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio blasts ‘stupid media narrative' of Zelensky being bullied by Trump
Secretary of State Marco Rubio blasts ‘stupid media narrative' of Zelensky being bullied by Trump

The Independent

time44 minutes ago

  • The Independent

Secretary of State Marco Rubio blasts ‘stupid media narrative' of Zelensky being bullied by Trump

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has blasted the "stupid media narrative" that President Donald Trump is going to "bully" Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into signing a bad deal with Russia. Rubio pushed back during a Sunday appearance on CBS, where he was asked about the European leaders attending the negotiations with Zelensky and if this was to ensure he isn't "bullied into signing something away" by Trump. Trump is set to meet Monday with Zelensky, several European leaders and NATO's secretary-general. Trump met with Putin for nearly three hours Friday at a U.S. military base in Anchorage. In their first meeting in six years the two leaders discussed the war in Ukraine. Trump has pushed for peace in the region but no ceasefire deal came out of the talks. 'That's why you have these European leaders coming as backup tomorrow. Can you reassure them?' Margaret Brennan asked Rubio. 'That's not true,' Rubio replied. 'They're not coming here tomorrow to keep Zelensky from being bullied. They're coming here tomorrow because we've been working with the Europeans. We talked to them last week. There were meetings in the U.K. over the following, the previous weekend.' He added that the suggestion of bullying was a 'stupid media narrative'. "They're coming here tomorrow because they chose to come here tomorrow. We invited them to come. We invited them to come. The president invited them to come," Rubio insisted. The secretary of state noted that the U.S. has met with Zelensky many more times than with Putin. Brennan recalled Trump's meeting with Zelensky in Washington, D.C. during which Vice President JD Vance asked the Ukrainian leader how often he'd said "thank you" for America's help with the war. 'You're right now, not in a very good position. You're not in a good position. You don't have the cards right now with us,' Trump also said to Zelensky during the extraordinary meeting. His fiery response came after Zelensky told Trump the U.S. would 'feel it in the future' if Trump ignored Russia's actions in Europe. 'I'm not playing cards right now, I'm very serious Mr President. I am a wartime president,' Zelensky replied, further infuriating Trump. 'You're gambling with the lives of millions of people. You're gambling with World War Three,' Trump shouted. 'You're gambling with World War Three, and what you're doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country, far more than a lot of people say they should.' After that, Vance asked Zelensky 'have you said thank you once?' 'A lot of times. Even today,' Zelensky replied. Rubio was present in the Oval Office for that meeting. Rubio also appeared Sunday on NBC's morning show where he was asked if he could name a single concession that Trump was going to ask Russia to make. Rubio refused to answer, insisting that doing so would potentially degrade the negotiations. "Well I'm not going to name those things because if I do, you can imagine, our negotiations could fall apart," Rubio said. "I know everybody wants to know what's happening — and to a certain degree that's important — but what's more important is these negotiations work."

Oil slips as Russia supply concerns ease after Trump-Putin meet
Oil slips as Russia supply concerns ease after Trump-Putin meet

Reuters

time44 minutes ago

  • Reuters

Oil slips as Russia supply concerns ease after Trump-Putin meet

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