Donald Trump’s NFTs are the perfect symbol of American capitalism in 2023

After making six-figure profits on its initial offering last year, Donald Trump has just released a new round of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). On an aesthetic level is Pictures is strangely fascinating in its garishness. In one, the former president is shown as George Washington crossing the Delaware. In another, he is dressed in leather and hoists an electric guitar. In a third, he wears camo while wielding a crossbow and binoculars in front of a blurred forest.

Like the previous Trump-themed NFTs, the latest series is boldly artificial in appearance, assembled from bland stock photos and channels a kitsch iconography of Americana, money and machismo. Their components, recycled again and again across dozens of different NFTs, have all the elegance of Windows 98-era clippings, and some (like this one showing Trump standing in space wearing sunglasses with a basketball in hand) don’t even have thematic meaningful.

Trump has released the latest round of Trump NFTs, including: Trump Crossing the Delaware, Trump the Bowhunter, Rock ‘n’ Roll Trump.

$99 each. pic.twitter.com/cCrgi55VfD

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) 18 April 2023

Aesthetically, the collection reflects a pared-down version of the burlesque pastiche that has become the house style of Trump-era conservatism. This peculiar genre of reactionary art fuses the idioms of a foolish American nationalism with the cheap superficiality of an infomercial or late-night motivational seminar. Best represented by the works of painter Jon McNaughton, it has produced images that are both flaky in form and grand in ambition. In Trump’s NFTs, the style has evolved into what might as well be the punch line of a cruel joke originating from Andy Warhol: a kind of algorithmically generated, Dadaist folk art that almost transcends valuations like ugliness, truth, and beauty.

For the low, low price of around one hundred dollars, you can now purchase an ersatz likeness of America’s forty-fifth president that cannot physically exist outside of the digital ether. Even for Trump, a man whose entire life has consisted of a series of bogus scams, it takes astonishing chutzpah to put a price tag on something so obviously useless—especially in 2023, after the NFT bubble has already burst.

However, both Trump’s embrace of the medium and his timing make it all a perfect marriage. Much like Trump’s career, the crypto-NFT boom was a giant confidence trick that rode a wave of inflated perceptions and showbiz hype before leaving a trail of human misery in its wake. Speculative virtual goods are the familiar rip-the-copper-wires-out-of-the-walls stage of American capitalism, an attempt at predatory interest-seeking with no pretense of social or utility value. The legitimacy they briefly enjoyed was largely due to liberal celebrities paying truckloads of money to get Bored Ape gifs on social media and late on TV. As thin as this was, it succeeded in giving the crypto-NFT racket a momentary tinge of chic and glitz.

It follows that someone like Trump would get in on the action only after this initial buzz had died down. Throughout his career, Trump has taken the structuring myths of American capitalism – national exceptionalism, free enterprise, the white patriarch, the self-made billionaire – and performed them as a baroque and vulgar pantomime cut from subtext. He’s a man better known for playing a real estate tycoon than being one; a politician who projects the worst horrors of the conservative psyche without any of the traditional appeals to unity, civility or moral integrity. If NFTs are capitalism stripped to its most transactional elements in a gilded age of earned confidence, artificial intelligence and the blockchain, Trump represents the distillation of culture and politics into an ethos of shameless cruelty and boundless commercialization.

Through his rhetoric and speech patterns, we have become familiar with what this sounds like. In his NFTs, and the wider aesthetic sensibility they reflect, we are offered the howlingly bleak portrait of what the look as.

Not coincidentally, the most authentic moments in Trump’s 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal found in his lavish and sometimes even tender descriptions of surfaces. For Trump, then and now, life is fundamentally about perception and appearance rather than depth or substance. As a businessman, and then as a politician, he has thus innovated a whole new language of exaggeration and exaggeration. “The point is that we got a lot of attention,” he writes Art of the Deal of a never-fulfilled promise to build the world’s tallest building that may also serve as an operating principle for American politics and culture today, “and that alone creates value.”