Next month the president is planning to host a pay-for-play event, right out in the open, in which there’s good reason to believe that wealthy foreigners will be participating.

The event is being billed as an “intimate private dinner” with Trump at his club in Virginia on May 22. Invitations will be limited to the top 220 investors in the memecoin he launched shortly before being sworn in. The coin’s value soared this week as investors sought to buy up enough to make the cut. And that money isn’t going to a campaign or PAC, which is the way rich people typically buy access to public officials. It’s headed for Donald Trump’s own pockets.

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Even for Trump, that’s pretty Trump. “This is really incredible,” one of Biden’s deputies on regulating crypto told the Times of the May 22 dinner. “They are making the pay-to-play deal explicit.” A lobbyist for a consumer advocacy group described the event to Bloomberg as “buying influence with the president, there’s no ifs ands or buts about it,” and marveled that “we’ve never had a president who is so in love with money as this one.” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy called it “the most brazenly corrupt thing a president has ever done.”

Nick Catoggio