A Major Grift

So yesterday, donald "Prep Me For a Perp Walk" trump got on his social media app claiming "A MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT" happening today (Dec. 15th).

Speculation went rampant. Some were pondering him making a media attack on the various criminal and civil cases he was facing in New York City, with this weird artwork of him posing in a superhero outfit outside his Trump Tower.

Bill Kristol went as far as suggesting this was trump making a move for the Speakership of the U.S. House (fun fact, anybody can serve as Speaker, you don't have to be an elected Representative).

I have to admit I saw Kristol's tweeting on the matter as well as a few others repeating the same thing, and I have to admit I panicked. The possibility of trump forcing himself upon the Congressional Republicans in a do-or-die decision carried the possibility of party breakdown and open civil war.

So what DID happen when trump made his MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT this morning?

Trading cards.

The goddamn Shitgibbon is shilling trading cards of his likeness - drawn as 'manly' figures like cowboys, astronauts, and superheroes - for his followers to gobble up like collectibles, all at the low low price of $99.00 a card. And they're not even physical cards: They're NFTs, fully digital, not even real at all.

The tension went from "What the fuck will happen" to "WHAT THE FUCK HE DOING NOW?"

I had to go to Kotaku's Sisi Jiang for more detail:

A new line of, expensive Non-Fungible Tokens is apparently the “major announcement” Trump first teased yesterday, in a Truth Social post declaring that “AMERICA NEEDS A SUPERHERO!” The accompanying teaser video showed a brief glimpse of a muscled, Trump-like figure adorned like Superman, complete with animated lasers beaming from its eyes. And now we know: That “major announcement” is just a new line of NFTs.

Aside from Trump shooting flaming lasers out of both of his eyes, other NFTs in the range feature him photoshopped awkwardly in gaudy outfits. But wait, there’s more! If you buy one of these “digital collectibles,” you could win the opportunity to meet him over dinner, play a round of golf, or speak to the ex-president over a Zoom call.

I don’t know what’s more depressing: the sheer insecurity that oozes from these NFT trading cards, or the plausibility that his cult of Republican goons might actually purchase these in droves...

If he manages to sell 40 of these “trading cards,” then he’d be able to pay off the $4,000 he owes for being found in contempt of court on Tuesday. I wish him all the best.

All of this storm and fury coming out of trump, and it all ends up yet another grift from him, another attempt to squeeze as much money from the TRUMP (tm) brand he possibly can before the courts take whatever real money he has left from his crumbling empire.

I should have known. We all should have known. Everything about trump is about him making money. Even the Presidency, and the ongoing campaigning he does to try and get back into high office so he can avoid criminal accountability for every con job he's been running all these years.

If the results of last week's jury decision is any indication, trump is quickly losing revenue streams he used to rely on. he's going back to the "Trump Steaks" scheme of old where he took someone else's product and slapped his name on it to sell it at a higher price. Here he's taking other people's artwork of him and shilling them as collectibles even as everyone else can visit the website and copy the images for themselves without giving a rat's ass what the NFT status will be.

It's a joke of a con game. Damn me - and everybody else - for getting suckered by it.

In the meantime, you don't need to waste any $99 on something that's not even worth a wooden nickel. You ought to spend that $99 on coming up with a collectible card game that people can actually play, and getting a gaming company to buy it/market it for you. Make something useful and real, America. Gods help us if anybody buys trump's junk.