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Trading Cards

I wasn't very athletic in my youth, or any other part of my life actually. In any event I never collected baseball cards. This was long before there were other kinds of cards to collect, so not being into baseball cards meant I wasn't into trading cards. I had friends who were into it and that was cool.

Our former president teased Wednesday that he was going to make a major announcement yesterday (Thursday). He had already announced his candidacy for the presidency, and it seemed not unreasonable to think that it might be related to that candidacy. To my knowledge he has no campaign manager or staff yet, which makes that announcement a bit weird.

It turns out that the announcement was that he was selling pretty cheesy looking NFT's with his head photoshopped on tops of a child's idea of masculine figures (superhero, astronaut, etc.). They look bad and sell for $99 each. Since they are NFT's you don't actually get the image to hold in your hands, although he refers to them as trading cards.. Trump gets a cut if you try to resell it.

This is so unlike the behavior of any other presidential candidate that I am aware of that it is worth asking why.  I've seen some answers floated in recent days:

1) He needs the money. He's legally prevented and delayed for years the release of any of his financial records but with the fraud convictions in New York state his organization may be hurting, or he may not have been very wealthy at all. It's hard to know anything other than he is willing to spend a lot on legal fees to keep us from knowing.

2) He needs the adulation and his rallies weren't enough.

3) Habit. He's pushed so many cheesy products (Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump University, ...) over the years that he needs to do something to separate people from their money.

I think that part of the near-universal ridicule Trump has received has been that he claimed that this was a major announcement, but that hyperbole is his longstanding habit. Anything he does is major in his own mind.

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