Donald Trump's New Line of NFT Allow Him to Realize His Dream of Becoming a One Man Village People
Disgraced, twice-impeached one-term ex-president and glorified carnival barker Donald Trump recently teased a MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT.
The public is all too familiar with Trump’s predilection for wild hyperbole yet some folks still held out hope that Trump’s MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT wouldn’t be complete bullshit.
Was he going to announce some cursed soul as his 2024 running mate, despite not having actually won the 2024 Republican nomination? Or was he going to dramatically announce his return to Twitter alongside a beaming Elon Musk?
Alternately, was the Ghosts Can’t Do It cast-member going to waste everyone’s time with an NFT release even tackier and more pathetic than most?
In an extremely unsurprising turn of events, the MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT Trump promised turned out to be a line of NFTs featuring Trump in a series of extremely manly poses and outfits for the low, low price of just 99 dollars.
and to think, Conservatives lost their shit when Obama wore a tan suit.
In a Trump Social post that barely qualifies as news, let alone history, Trump gushed, with his trademark used car salesman smarminess, “These limited edition cards feature amazing ART of my Life & Career! Collect all of your favorite Trump Digital Trading Cards, very much like a baseball card, but hopefully much more exciting… Only $99 each! Would make a great Christmas gift. Don’t Wait. They will be gone, I believe, very quickly!”
Trump is notoriously a tacky grifter but even by Trump’s very lenient standards, this is some tacky-ass grifter shit though it speaks to the self-professed very stable genius’ gift for timing that he chose to leap into the scummy, shallow pool of NFTs after the market had dramatically gone bust.
The NFTs show Trump not as he actually is, an overweight old man in baggy, ill-fitting clothes with orange skin and a hairdo that has been the source of morbid fascination and speculation for decades, but rather as he sees himself, how his followers see him and how he would like to be seen.
These NFTs carry on the pioneering work of painter John McNaughton and cartoonist Ben Garrison in depicting a portly senior citizen who dresses like a business man in a comic strip into a strapping, muscular stud, the very image of rugged American masculinity.
When people asked Garrison why he draws a seventy-something with a tapioca pudding physique he said something to the effect that Trump has the aura and the presence of a much younger, more fit man, and that his art is supposed to reflect that excitement.
One of the NFTs depicts Trump shooting lasers out of his eyes while ripping open his suit to reveal a superhero costume, complete a rippling twelve-pack in front of Trump Tower.
It’s quite possibly the cheesiest shit I have ever seen in my entire life and I have been to the Gathering of the Juggalos many times. Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J wouldn’t lower themselves to this carny foolishness but a man who wants to be elected to the most powerful position in the world is happily rolling around in this digital pig shit in exchange for money.
When I look at these astonishingly hideous images I’m mortified and amused but more than anything I’m saddened. There’s something deeply poignant as well as pathetic about these digital trading cards.
Trump wants so badly to be anything other than what he is—a dangerously unhealthy old man close to death but not nearly close enough—that he enthusiastically consented to simpatico charlatans sticking a cleaned-up version of his giant head onto bodies that are younger, thinner, more masculine and healthier than his own, which is sagging, failing and soft where he would like it to be ripped and sexy.
Trump is clearly embarrassed to be a little rich boy with soft hands who spent his life making deals in skyscrapers so this NFT collection re-imagines him as an endless series of macho archetypes.
You know who else did that? The people who put together the Village People. But in that case the disco superstars were SUPPOSED to be campy. They were supposed be kitschy, homoerotic send-ups of American machismo.
There was wit and subversion in The Village People’s send-up of hyper-masculinity. There is no irony, self-awareness or wit in Trump selling fantasy images of himself to his crazed cultists for 99 dollars a pop.
It’s poignant, really, that someone who has succeeded spectacularly in business and politics still feels the need to put out a digital dress-up doll version of himself with cyber-outfits like cowboy, superhero, astronaut and Hollywood hotshot.
This NFT release is clearly not the work of a serious man or a man who should be taken seriously but they are the perfect reflection of Trump’s emotionally stunted world of posturing and make-pretend.
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