Dance$ with emolument$ as Trump sells crypto

When Donald Trump was headed for the Republican nomination in the summer of 2016, I took Carl Hulse, our chief Washington correspondent, to Trump Tower to meet him.

- Maureen Dowd

Mr Trump didn’t know anything about the inner workings of Washington. He proudly showed us his “Wall of Shame” with pictures of Republican candidates he had bested.

His campaign office had few staffers, but it overflowed with cheesy portraits of him sent by fans: one of him playing poker with Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Teddy Roosevelt, and a cardboard cutout of him giving a thumbs-up, flanked by Reagan and John Wayne.

As we were leaving, Hulse warned Mr Trump dryly, “If you ever get a call from our colleague Eric Lipton, you'll know you're in trouble.”

“Eric Lipton?” Mr Trump murmured.

The president probably knows who Lipton is now, because the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter is tracking Mr Trump on issues of corruption as closely as the relentless lawman in the white straw hat tracked Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Lipton and the Times’ David Yaffe-Bellany were on the scene at Trump's Virginia golf club Thursday night as the president held his gala dinner to promote sales of $TRUMP, the meme coin he launched on the cusp of his inauguration. (Melania Trump debuted hers two days later.)

Mr Trump has been hawking himself in an absurdly grandiose way his whole life. But this time, he isn’t grandstanding as a flamboyant New York businessperson. He's selling himself as the president of the United States, staining his office with a blithe display of turpitude.