From President of the United States to NFT trader – has Trump finally hit rock bottom? | Arwa Mahdawi

Trump earns from trading cards

Oh, how the mighty have fallen! Just a few years ago, Donald Trump was the most powerful man in the world. He had an army of yes-men, acolytes who hung on his every word. He was close to his family: his eldest daughter and his son-in-law were his special advisers. He had a Twitter account with millions of followers. He made policy and moved markets. He may have been a laughing stock, but he had power and influence.

Now, however, Trump is just a laughing stock with a lot of legal problems. His former cheerleaders, including the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, have turned their backs on him. Even his family is keeping their distance: Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have cut all public ties with the former president. A normal person can keep a low profile in this situation. They can regroup, do some damage control, and figure out how to rebuild their reputation. Not Trump. Instead, he decided to end 2022 in the most unhinged way possible: releasing a collection of superhero digital trading cards. For just $99 each, you can buy non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of Trump dressed in various guises, including an astronaut, a fighter pilot and a superhero with lasers coming out of his eyes.

Is anyone really stupid enough to waste their hard-earned money on a digitally generated image of Trump dressed as Superman? Apparently so. According to the website that sells the NFTs, the trading cards sold out less than 24 hours after Trump announced they were available. Which isn’t too bad considering it’s been reported that there were 45,000 of the cards available for sale. Still, I would take these numbers with a grain of salt. Remember when Melania launched an NFT around this time last year? It sold for $180,000, but a blockchain expert discovered that the winning bid was either from Melania herself or whoever set up the NFT’s sale. And remember when Donald Trump Jr wrote a book in 2019 with the imaginative title Triggered, which topped the New York Times bestseller list? It turns out he had a little help from his friends: The Republican National Committee spent nearly $100,000 on a bulk order for the book that helped propel it to the top of the bestseller lists.

It’s not clear if Trump obtained all of his own trading cards, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case. If all sales were truly organic, however, Trump managed to make almost $45,000 overnight: under a licensing deal, all revenue goes to Trump instead of his 2024 presidential campaign. You gotta hand it to the man, he’s coming up with some creative ways to make money. Not everyone is impressed by his ingenuity. A far-right troll best known by his online persona Baked Alaska, who faces jail time for his role in the January 6 riots, was horrified by his former hero’s new venture. “I can’t believe I’m going to jail for an NFT seller,” he tweeted. When a guy named Baked Alaska finds you embarrassing, you’ve officially hit rock bottom.

Scientists have finally found the snake’s clitoris

(Male snakes, on the other hand, are still trying to figure it out.) If you had no idea snakes had clitoris until now, you’re not the only one. Previous research mistook the organs – snakes have two individual clitoris – for scent glands. The lead author of the study revealing these findings notes that “a massive taboo around female genitalia” probably played a role in why snake clitoris had gone undiscovered for so long. “I think it’s a combination of not knowing what to look for and not wanting to,” she said.

Iran expelled from the UN body tasked with empowering women

It turns out that cracking down on protests that demand equality is somewhat at odds with “empowering women”.

Bad grandmothers are the new pop culture icons

“A growing resistance to the tired grandmother trope in popular culture as frail, lonely and limping is popping up in surprising places,” writes Sally Feldman in the Guardian.

Has prestige television finally conquered the penis?

Yes, according to Slate. If you watched White Lotus, you might have noticed some full-frontal male nudity – it was kind of hard to ignore. (Theo James described his prosthetic penis as looking like it had been stolen “by a donkey.”) While this sort of thing used to be pretty rare on TV, recently there’s been a proliferation of prime-time penises. Whether this is a positive development or not is up for debate.

Did the US women’s soccer team win its “equal pay case”? It’s complicated

Like many legal battles, the only ones that really came out in front were the lawyers.

Shocking testimony of abuse from IDF veterans

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) often use their female soldiers to clean up their image. But feminism and militarism rarely mix. Just take a look at this shocking new video project where IDF veterans talk about the grim reality of the occupation and a culture of dehumanization and violence against Palestinians.

Norway proposes a 40% gender quota for large unlisted companies

In 2005, Norway became the first country in the world to introduce a gender quota of 40% on the boards of listed companies, which forced other countries to follow suit. Last month, the EU Parliament passed a law that requires large listed companies in the EU to have at least 40% of non-executive board members be women from mid-2026. Now Norway recommends that large private companies should also have a 40% gender quota.

The election in Tunisia will deliver a male-dominated parliament and the erosion of women’s rights

In 2014, almost a third of members of parliament in Tunisia were women. However, after President Kais Saied removed a requirement for candidate lists to alternate between the sexes, only 122 female candidates, compared to 936 men, were approved to run in the current election. Tunisians will vote on Saturday and activists expect the new parliament to be male-dominated. “The Tunisian parliament was once the example of gender equality in the region. With these new changes to the law, it could soon be history,” wrote Salsabil Chellali, Tunisia’s director of Human Rights Watch, on a blog.

The week in plot hierarchy

The New York Post may be a right-wing rag, but I have to admit that the greatest headline-writing minds of our generation work there. The Post dedicated its front page last Wednesday to the news of Sam Bankman-Fried’s arrest and captioned a photo of the hirsute former billionaire with the headline “HAIR PLOTTING.” Magic.