When Javier Selgas, the CEO of Freight Technologies, Inc., or Fr8Tech, a publicly traded trucking logistics firm, was thinking about how he might influence policy in President Donald Trump’s second administration, he landed on a novel mechanism: buying $20 million worth of $TRUMP tokens, the cryptocurrency meme coin (colloquially known as a “shitcoin”) Trump had released the day before inauguration weekend.

“We believe that the addition of the Official Trump tokens are an excellent way to diversify our crypto treasury, and also an effective way to advocate for fair, balanced, and free trade between Mexico and the US,” said Selgas in a press release. The company also disclosed the purchase in Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, noting that it took out $20 million in debt to buy the tokens, whose value can fluctuate wildly. (In a stricter economic sense, meme coins like $TRUMP are considered to have no inherent value, their price propped up by hype, the hopeful delusions of speculators, and market manipulation. So in that sense, Fr8Tech was borrowing $20 million for the financial equivalent of air.)

But the motives of using corporate treasuries and borrowing capacity for a shitcoin were perfectly clear. Twenty million dollars may be enough to vault Selgas to the top of the leaderboard of owners of $TRUMP, which would land him an audience with the president, who recently announced that the top 220 on the leaderboard would be invited to a presidential dinner.
If the president, with the backing of the Supreme Court, hadn’t claimed broad immunity for himself, the $TRUMP dinner might be considered an unparalleled form of potentially illegal influence peddling. Instead, it’s another lucrative way the president has found to monetize his office. And even if it were still illegal—which it may well be—the president’s team of regulators and law enforcers are highly unlikely to see it that way.