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Today: Trump Attends Dinner For $Trump Memecoin Holders; Chinese Crypto Billionaire Announces He's Top Trump Coin Holder; Israeli Ambassador Visits Site Of Deadly Shooting; MAHA Commission Releases Report On Children. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired May 22, 2025 - 12:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[12:31:33]

DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: What's one way to get invited to dinner with President Trump? Buying one of his meme coins. The 220 top holders of the coin are invited to a dinner tonight at his Virginia Golf Club.

The top 25 get to attend an even more private reception. But who are they? Well, we actually don't really know. Bloomberg News found that more than half of the top holders of the meme coin are likely foreign. They use foreign exchanges that ban American users.

Trump's family or business associates get a cut when that coin is bought and sold. And they also make money when its value goes up.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

KAROLINE LEAVITT, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: The president is abiding by all conflict of interest laws. The president has been incredibly transparent with his own personal financial obligations throughout the years. The president is a successful businessman. And I think, frankly, it's one of the many reasons that people re-elected him back to this office.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

BASH: My panel is back here. Josh Dawsey, you work at The Wall Street Journal. I'm just going to read a little bit of what they have this morning -- you have this morning. "The crypto user names and wallet addresses of the winners are listed on the Trump website leaderboard. But their real identities aren't disclosed.

If the contest is as above board as the president says, why not reveal the real names of the winners? Some of their identities are bound to come out anyway. The press, Democratic attorneys general, members of Congress are going to investigate." That's an editorial.

JOSH DAWSEY, POLITICAL INVESTIGATIONS REPORTER, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Yes. So let's talk about this dinner for a second.

BASH: OK. DAWSEY: The president has done lots of events at his club since he took office. Million dollar fundraisers, all sorts of events for his PAC, for his RNC, all sorts of things. This is for no political committee. This is a personal financial venture, right? That he is in business with this guy.

Bill Zanker runs this crypto event, is in personal business. So when we called the White House and asked about this event, they said, we don't comment on it. The White House has nothing to do with it. The White House isn't vetting the guests.

The White House has nothing to do with what the president is doing. It's a personal business commitment.

BASH: Is that even a thing when you're the president of the United States?

DAWSEY: When you're the president, I don't know how you separate. So we started doing some reporting. We figured out that a number of White House aides had tried to talk him out of going to the dinner. His own son, Eric Trump, had been surprised that the dinner existed.

When that dinner was announced, people in the White House thought, some of them, that it was a fake. There was nothing on his calendar. There was nothing that they saw that was planned. And they said, what's this? And they learned he had signed up for it. He had agreed to do this.

So it is a dinner at his private club with investors the White House is not vetting for a private business venture. I --

BASH: So just to be clear, this is a money-making event. Not for a campaign.

DAWSEY: Right.

BASH: Obviously not for charity.

DAWSEY: Right.

BASH: For his pocket.

DAWSEY: For a venture that he went in. And the folks, the investors who were there got promised White House tours. So they're coming to town. They're going to his golf club. They're paying their dinner with the president. And then they get a tour of the White House. Like, that is just a fax of what this dinner is.

BASH: OK, so we said that we really don't know who won this. We do know, according to Justin Sun, that he is one of the people who is going to go to this dinner. He wrote on social media, "Honored to support POTUS and grateful for the invitation". He said, "As the top holder of hashtag Trump," which I think is the Trump meme coin, "I'm excited to connect with everyone, talk crypto, and discuss the future of our industry."

[12:35:07]

I know you've done a lot of work on this, Laura. Just hang one second. Who is Justin Sun? Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur, founder of the blockchain company Tron. He was charged by U.S. regulators in 2023, but the case was paused in February as the president, President Trump, took office. And Forbes reports that Sun's actions have generated an estimated $400 million for the Trump family.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Right. These -- when you are purchasing, you know, meme coin crypto, when you are deciding to invest, as the United Arab Emirates has in the stablecoin crypto firm that the family is in charge of, that his two -- Trump's two sons are in charge of, that is money that is going directly into the pockets of the Trump family.

And eventually President Trump, if not currently President Trump himself, because he is the financial beneficiary of these companies. It is not a blind trust the way past presidents have typically done a blind trust. It's a trust, but this money is enriching the president himself.

And again, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked about specifically this dinner this week, and he really had no answer. He was asked about whether or not the investors have been vetted, the people that are going to get this direct access to the president. And he essentially said, I have no idea about the dinner that you're talking about.

BASH: And, you know, this kind of stuff used to matter a lot. The question is whether it still does and whether Democrats have any chance of winning some political points on that.

AMY WALTER, POLITICAL ANALYST, PBS NEWS HOUR: Yes, there's -- the question about whether this is really baked into perceptions of Donald Trump. If you already believe that he's been doing these things all along, enriching himself, it's a corruption piece, you haven't liked him probably from the beginning.

If you believe that this is somebody who's picking on a good businessman who's just looking out for his interests, there's no -- he's not doing anything that other politicians haven't done, you still stick with him. I think what we're seeing in the polling is it's a little bit of both.

It's that voters are pretty cynical about politicians, and they do believe that they're all corrupt to a certain extent and they all do these things, even though we know that you can't do them and the law tells me you can't do that. Where Democrats, what they talk about is you have to make the connection, they say, between the corruption, but how it impacts you.

So just saying he's making money. I think for a lot of voters they say, yes, that's what a lot of --

BASH: Yes.

WALTER: -- that's what a lot of these folks do, Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: The reason it matters and the reason it's different is, as Josh was explaining, he's done a million dinners. This is different. Many of the people attending tonight will be foreigners who cannot contribute to normal --

WALTER: Yes.

ZELENY: -- campaigns. But this is one way that they can get access to the president and can essentially grease the skids that they cannot do in political action committees. So that is the difference here. There are foreign interests and foreigners specifically who can't take part in the U.S. political process because there are laws against that.

DAWSEY: And what the president has done is he's set up his clubs, his various clubs. His Virginia Golf Club, Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster, have private events almost every weekend, all the time, right? They all are donors. People are writing seven-figure checks to various things related to him.

Tonight it's just him personally. So folks who can't get meetings at the White House are saying, you know what I'll do? I'll pay the record million dollars and join Mar-a-Lago. I'll pay $1.5 million and go to this crypto fundraiser where I can talk to the president's entire Cabinet.

Everyone in this moment who is trying to get something from the White House is trying to get one of his clubs, want to write a check. There you have it.

BARRON-LOPEZ (?): Also compared to --

BASH: You -- I just want to say you wrote about this today.

DAWSEY: Right.

BASH: We have a headline as I bring you in. There you go. There it is.

BARRON-LOPEZ: Yes, and so that is some of also what happened in the first administration, right, which was people going to these social clubs and paying in. The big difference between the first administration and this time around is we're talking about billions of dollars, not just millions and hundreds of thousands, when we're talking about the cryptocurrency empire that the president and his family are building.

BASH: All right, everybody stand by. The White House just released the first report from the MAHA, Make America Healthy Again Commission. What it says about children, about vaccines, processed foods, medications and more after a quick break.

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[12:44:06]

BASH: I want to get straight to the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Yechiel Leiter, visiting the site of the deadly overnight shooting.

YECHIEL LEITER, ISRAELI AMBASSADOR TO THE U.S.: Long before there was anything called Palestine as a geographic location, there was Israel, the people of Israel and the land of Israel. We've come home. We plan to stay there. And we're not going to be intimidated by the violence of those screaming on behalf of Palestine.

These were two young, beautiful people, Yaron and Sarah, who plan to be engaged next week in Jerusalem. Yaron bought an engagement ring this week. He was taking his soon-to-be bride to meet his parents who live just outside of Jerusalem.

Their murder will not be in vain. People of Israel's embassy in Washington will continue to serve the people of Israel and to bridge the friendship, the deep of the friendship, between the American people and the people of Israel.

[12:45:10]

We will not be deterred. We are a resilient people. Israel is resilient. The United States is resilient. Together we're going to stand off and defeat this anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism, which parades around as something along the lines of freedom-seeking. This is not freedom-seeking.

Hamas is a death cult. They declared war on behalf of Iran and a ring of fire in order to eradicate us. And this individual here last night was an extension of that ring of fire. They will be defeated.

Thank you.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We will now take some questions. CNN, please.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you, Mr. Ambassador, and of course I'm very sorry for the loss of your two staffers. I was wondering if you could comment on whether you've learned anything, either from the Israeli security services or the American law enforcement, about the writings of the suspect and perhaps any connection to activists or terror groups.

And then more broadly, could you comment on how anti-Semitism around the world is affected because of Prime Minister Netanyahu's war aims of continuing the war to eradicate Hamas? Thank you.

LEITER: We don't have any further information. I was here last night with Washington's chief of police, the mayor of Washington, and of course all the law enforcement agencies. The suspect continues to be under investigation.

I don't have an update as to the extent to which he was working alone or with others or whether or not he has any contorted manifesto or something along those lines. I reject your question or the insinuation that anti-Semitism is rising because of Israel's defense of its country.

Hamas declared war. Israel is responding to that war. We will not allow Hamastan to exist on our borders. We will not allow an Iranian proxy to exist on our borders. We had our people slaughtered. It's not going to happen again.

Hamas has to be destroyed, will be destroyed, the very same way that the Nazis were destroyed. These are new Nazis and we're going to defeat them. Anti-Semitism is on the rise, not because of Israel's responding, but because of countries like France, who under this circumstance, now, tomorrow, plan to propose the unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state.

So the French, in their contorted morality under the government of Macron, is going to declare October 7th Palestine Independence Day. This is a contorted sense of morality. They should be ashamed of themselves and we're going to oppose that in the area of diplomacy as well.

(Speaking in Foreign Language)

BASH: So we've been listening to the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Ambassador Leiter, talking about the staffers of his, people who worked for him, worked for the embassy of Israel here in Washington, the victims of an anti-Semitic attack.

And we want to remember those two victims. You see them there. Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, Yaron, Israeli, Sarah, American, a young couple just starting out their lives together. As you just heard from the Ambassador, Yaron just recently bought an engagement ring. They were planning on going to Israel so that he could introduce her to his family.

Friends describe them as respectful, kind people. He loved -- and his dream was to work in diplomacy. And as for Sarah, she graduated from the University of Kansas. The school's Hillel remembers her as a bright spirit and passion, has a lot of passion for the Jewish community.

And she was also devoted to an organization that provides entrepreneurial training to young Palestinians and Israelis along with conflict dialogue. May their memories be a blessing.

We'll be right back.

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[12:54:16]

BASH: Just moments ago, the White House released a report from the Make America Healthy Again Commission. The report focuses on the so- called epidemic of chronic disease in children and is focused partly on processed food and medications.

CNN's Meg Tirrell has been reading through the report. Meg, walk us through what it says.

MEG TIRRELL, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Dana, I mean, this is part one, really, of a two-part set of reports we're going to see. The next one's probably going to come by August and actually lay out the strategy of what they're going to do here.

But this is what they are essentially calling the assessment of what they see as the problem. This was done by a 14-person commission, the MAHA Commission, chaired by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Health Secretary, but also with representatives from the Department of Agriculture, the EPA, the FDA, the NIH and others across the government and in the White House as well.

[12:55:07]

And they lay out a few things that they see as the drivers of the rising rates of childhood chronic diseases. Number one, they say, is a poor diet, with a big focus on ultra-processed foods. They also focus on environmental chemicals in the food, water and the air, things like pesticides and microplastics.

They also point to a lack of physical activity and chronic stress. And they point to screen time and changes in the way, you know, kids are living their lives. And also what they call over-medicalization, focusing on different medicines and the childhood vaccine schedule. And throughout all of this, they say that there are corporate conflicts of interest influencing all of these places.

Now, Dana, there's probably a lot of agreement on things like ultra- processed foods. But what is going to get a lot of scrutiny, especially given Kennedy's history of sowing doubt about the safety of vaccines, is going to be what he calls this over-medicalization.

And there, they focus on a different -- a few different drug classes, including ADHD medications, antidepressants, antibiotics, asthma and GLP-1 drugs. Those, of course, things like Ozempic and Wegovy for weight management, as well as the childhood vaccine schedule.

We don't see a lot of laying out of what they're going to do about this in this report. That we'll look for in August, Dana.

BASH: So just to be clear, on the vaccines, which is what everybody was kind of looking at to see what it says, everybody, I mean, everybody in the medical community and a lot of people in his community who are, you know, anti-vax for whatever reason, it just talks about the schedule and not exactly the safety?

TIRRELL: It does. But embedded in this report, he also talks about the rising rates of autism. And of course, this is an area where Kennedy in the past has inappropriately, according to the science, drawn a connection between vaccines and autism.

And so they are going to be studying autism in a major way at the NIH. And there are fears around what they may do with that in terms of inappropriately tying that to vaccines.

But there's been a lot of pushback to this report already, Dana, on the food part of it. Particularly from the agriculture industry. We just got a statement from the National Corn Growers Association saying that this report is, quote, "filled with fear-based rather than science-based misinformation about pesticides". So there's quite a lot of tension here between industry and what they're focusing on in this report.

BASH: Yes. And on that, that's not surprising at all, because the industries that they talk about are the very ones that they claim are sort of aiding and abetting the food problems in America. So we're definitely going to have to, as you say all the time, do our due diligence and really try to get to the facts here.

Meg, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

And be sure not to miss The Source with Kaitlan Collins tonight. She is going to interview the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. That's at 9:00 p.m. Eastern, only on CNN.

Thanks so much for joining Inside Politics today. CNN News Central starts after the break.

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