(Bloomberg) -- A dinner on Thursday in Washington — billed as the “Most Exclusive Once in Lifetime Invitation” — is the latest and boldest spectacle Bill Zanker has launched for Donald Trump.
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Since Zanker co-authored a 2007 book with Trump, they’ve had a number of splashy collaborations, including a crowdfunding site and a series of non-fungible tokens featuring superhero versions of Trump, with events for some of the largest holders at Trump’s private club, Mar-a-Lago.
These days, though, Zanker is uniquely positioned to sell the Trump name — and access to the president himself.
While Zanker, 71, has remained behind the scenes in recent years, he has built up a portfolio of at least six businesses associated with the president, including the memecoin known as $Trump, which has already spun off more than $300 million in fees for companies linked to Trump and Zanker, according to the data firm Chainalysis.
Zanker’s businesses with Trump carry many of the marks of the president’s other ventures: the aggressive push to make money from Trump’s name, the relative lack of transparency of the deals, and a disregard for the institutional norm that presidents should avoid the appearance that they are profiting personally from their political role.
Zanker’s name is not on the website for the memecoin and he has avoided any comment on it. But on a Delaware corporate filing, Zanker is listed as the “authorized person” for Fight Fight Fight LLC, the company that runs the coin’s website. He’s been instrumental in directing and marketing the business and organizing a dinner on Thursday where the top 220 holders of the coin will get to meet the president in person, according to people familiar with the project.
The event led to a spike in the value of the coins owned by companies linked to Trump and it has been widely criticized by ethics experts for offering access to the White House through transactions that are widely believed to directly benefit the president. Those concerns were heightened after Justin Sun, a China-born crypto entrepreneur, said on Tuesday that he would be attending the event at the same time he is looking to ramp up his business in the US and resolve a lawsuit that US regulators brought against him in 2023.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment, but spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said recently that “President Trump is compliant with all conflict-of-interest rules, and only acts in the best interests of the American public – which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media.”
Zanker declined to comment for this story. Last summer, in the only recent interview he has given, he told Bloomberg that in their decades-long relationship he has handled the details while Trump has offered the bigger vision.
“He is a man that likes to ask a lot of questions,” Zanker said of Trump in the interview “He asked a lot of questions, and then he makes his own decisions.”
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, sent a letter to Zanker this month, asking for more details about his role in the memecoin and the upcoming dinner — part of a nascent effort by Democrats on the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to dig into the crypto businesses affiliated with Trump and his family.
Trump Watches
Blumenthal said in an interview that Trump and Zanker are “pumping up the value of his cryptocurrency with all kinds of public stunts and offers, which seem to be a trademark of both Trump and Zanker.”
The broader portfolio run by Zanker includes Trump-branded shoes, watches, perfumes and an upcoming digital game, according to people familiar with the deals who asked not to be named because the information is confidential.
The websites for these products don’t mention Zanker and he is not on the corporate documents for the companies, but they are visibly intertwined with his other efforts. People who purchased large numbers of the NFTs got a pair of The Never Surrender Gold Low Top Sneakers, and the top four owners of the memecoins have been offered the Magnificent Trump Tourbillon, a gold and diamond-encrusted watch that retails for $100,000 on GetTrumpWatches.com. The websites for Zanker’s products accept the memecoin as a payment option and share the same naming scheme, with the cologne on GetTrumpFragrances.com and the $Trump coin on GetTrumpMemes.com.
Zanker is not involved with all Trump-affiliated businesses. His name, for example, is not publicly associated with Trump deodorants, bibles, and steaks, or the sprawling Trump real estate empire. World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency company owned in part by the Trump family, has said that it has no affiliation with Zanker.
When it comes to the memecoin, the organization run by Zanker, Fight Fight Fight, will share 80% of the total tokens issued by the project with CIC Digital LLC, “an affiliate of The Trump Organization” according to the website. The coins they will receive for free are worth a combined $2.1 billion when calculated using the price of the $Trump this week. Trump promoted the coins on social media when they were first released and in March when he wrote “I LOVE $TRUMP — SO COOL!!!,” leading to a spike in the value of the coin.
Zanker has worked with investors like Tim Draper, founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who said in an email that Zanker’s “enthusiasm is catching.” Austin Campbell, an entrepreneur and adjunct professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said he spoke with Zanker earlier this year about $Trump and offered advice on how to avoid some of the pitfalls that have plagued other similar projects.
“He reminds me of a lot of the people I’ve dealt with in the creative space: high energy, free thinking — the kind of people who feel like the laws of reality doesn’t apply to them,” Campbell said, adding that he doesn’t view those qualities as negative in the industry where Zanker operates. “You have to be that kind of thinker.”
Pickets Outside
The memecoin is, in some ways, a natural extension of the work that Zanker did earlier in his career, when he was not afraid to court controversy to sell a product. His adult education company, The Learning Annex, offered standard lectures on business and entrepreneurship, but also had a course on “How to find a lover,” and an exercise class focused on “improving your buns,” Zanker said during a 1986 appearance on David Letterman’s Late Night show.
“How to cheat on your mate was the most controversial course we had,” Zanker told Letterman. “We had pickets outside.”
Zanker brought Trump in to speak at events hosted by The Learning Annex, which led to a book that the men wrote together, Think Big and Kick Ass. In a foreword to a later edition of the book, Trump called Zanker “a gifted promoter.”
“Anyone who has been around Bill will never forget him,” Trump wrote.
During Trump’s first term, Zanker worked with his own children to create a boxing gym, GRIT BXNG, in New York and a Peloton-like startup aimed at building exercise equipment. But Zanker came back together with Trump before his second term to launch the non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, featuring various heroic images of Trump.
The first collection was ready to go on sale in 2022 roughly a month after the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, and Zanker told Bloomberg that he met with Trump at his club in Mar-a-Lago and asked if they should still go ahead with the project.
“You know what Bill,” Zanker remembered Trump saying, “a lot of my friends say I shouldn’t do it. But I like it, let’s do it.”
“Mr. President, it could take three to six month to sell out these cards,” Zanker said he told Trump. “He said, ‘Bill, let’s go.’ I said ‘Great, but don’t yell at me!’”
The cards ended up selling out quickly and brought in around $4.5 million – a sum they built on by issuing three more successful collections in the years leading up to the 2024 presidential election. Trump took a break from campaigning to attend two events at Mar-a-Lago for people who bought thousands of dollars of the cards. In a video of the 2024 dinner, Trump told the crowd: “I am doing this because I want you people to do well.”
Zanker said last year that the NFT collections and the events helped Trump turn from a Bitcoin skeptic into an outspoken advocate for the industry. It also allowed Zanker to expand his business relationship with the president to a host of new products like the watches and sneakers, which Trump has personally promoted.
Some of Zanker’s projects haven’t panned out as hoped. The crowdfunding site he and Trump created eventually closed shop. The memecoin plunged in value in the weeks after it was originally issued. It has recovered modestly since the announcement of the dinner for the top memecoin holders. That recovery, though, has not helped assuage the concerns of Trump’s critics. The coin presents an unprecedented conflict of interest, said Richard Painter, a White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush.
“You are going to have people close to the president who will put pressure on the president to do what they want,” Painter said. “If they want to listen to their friends, who are making huge amount of money in a business, it’s a breach of public trust.”
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