Donald Trump is, without question, the weirdest person to ever serve as president. Since he launched his political career by gliding down a golden escalator, we’ve seen him clog White House toilets with ripped-up memos, describe his fruit phobia in a deposition, body-shame an aircraft carrier, tell 24,000 Boy Scouts a story about sexy yacht parties, and announce to a crowd, unprompted, that he’d rather die by electrocution than by shark.
After eight years of covering these incidents, and many more, I consider myself a connoisseur of bizarre Trump behavior. But his latest moneymaking scheme — selling scraps of the suit he wore for his mug shot on trading cards — still took me aback. The announcement video Trump posted to Truth Social on Tuesday afternoon contains too many mind-boggling layers to process in just one viewing. See for yourself:
Confused? Allow me to break this down into more manageable pieces.
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Trump cut up his mug-shot suit and is selling the pieces.
Trump has always seen his mug shot as a marketing opportunity; he started selling merch featuring a fake mug shot before he even turned himself in at the Fulton County Jail, and the real image is currently plastered on various items in his campaign store, from coffee mugs to Christmas stockings.
He has also never shied away from presenting himself as a Jesus-like figure. So rather than throwing the suit he wore to his Georgia arrest back in his closet, he has cut it into pieces and is now offering it to MAGA true believers like relics of the crown of thorns.
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Yes, it’s the actual suit Trump wore during his arrest.
In the promo video, Trump says he’s selling “an authentic piece of the suit I wore when I took that now-famous mug shot,” musing, “it was a great suit. Believe me — a really good suit.”
But how do we know Trump didn’t cut up some other “great suit” to distribute among his followers? Well, collecttrumpcards.com claims it’s been appraised as not just authentic but “the Most Historically Significant Artifact in United States History.”
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Trump stuck pieces of his suit on trading cards.
A year ago, Trump released a batch of trading cards that depicted him as, among other things, a superhero, an astronaut, and an old-timey western gunslinger. These were both figuratively and literally unrealistic: Buyers got a digital NFT, not a physical card.
But pieces of the One True Suit will be shipped on actual cards you can hold in your hand. The website features this helpful diagram:
Trump says in the video, “I’ll be autographing some of them. A true collector’s item. This is something to give to your family, to your kids and grandchildren.” If you read the fine print, you’ll see that by “some,” Trump means he’s signing just 25 cards.
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You can obtain the physical cards only by buying an outrageous number of digital cards.
Trump buries the lede in his promotional video, announcing that he’s selling a third batch of digital trading cards before revealing that he has hacked up his mug-shot suit.
The NFTs are key to this sales pitch because you have to buy 47 digital cards to get the one physical card. As with the first two batches of Trump cards, these NFTs are $99 a pop. So it’ll cost you $4,653 to get a piece of Trump’s suit.
At least you’ll get other goodies, too, like a dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, a “commemorative hoodie,” and unspecified “Exclusive Treasures given out at the Gala Dinner,” according to the website. The first 200 people who buy 100 NFTs will get all those perks plus a second physical card, featuring part of the tie Trump wore to jail.
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The digital Trump cards are pretty ridiculous.
More ridiculous than the old NFT card depicting Trump on a golden surfboard, riding a wave made of bills with his face on them? Well, no. But batch three does include drawings of Trump as a fantasy warrior, Trump taking over the Lincoln Memorial, and Trump as an off-brand Iron Man with his absurd “NEVER SURRENDER” branding.
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Even Trump admits this is bonkers.
“Some people call these cards Pop Art or modern art,” Trump says in the promotional video. “I wish I looked as good as I do on those cards — that I can tell you. They give me muscles where, believe me, I don’t have them.”
Surprisingly humble words from a man who concludes his ad with an animation of himself as a golden god.
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