It is very easy to see how NFTs — non-fungible tokens; pieces of digital art created to be unique – would appeal to Donald Trump. People paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for exclusive ownership of a drawing of a monkey! All you had to do was create a picture, push some internet buttons somewhere, and suddenly you’re raking in money like there’s no tomorrow. For Donald Trump, a guy who used his name to sell everything from steaks to water, the idea would be irresistible.
Who convinced Donald Trump that Trump NFTs were a good idea?
So on Thursday, the former president of the United States — a guy who two years ago oversaw the enormous power of the U.S. government, a man who could at one time command armies and navies at will — announced that he was getting into the NFT game.
There is… only one few problems.
The first is that these NFT creators didn’t siphon off money, but crypto—that is, digital currency that’s only loosely tied to the actual economy. Many of these hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars sales were in currencies that have since lost a lot of value, making them, say, thousands-of-dollars sales.
The second is that people our pay a lot of money for NFTs. Crypto went through a boom in 2021 that helped drive the NFT market. In January, there were more than 322,000 collectibles sales a week, generating hundreds of millions of dollars. But by September, trading volume had collapsed by 97 percent. In the last week, according to NonFungible, there were only about 33,000 sales of NFTs for collectibles.
This is partly because crypto itself has been hammered. It is also, in part, because the NFT fad has deflated. NFTs were hyped as a major innovation in art and collecting – but it quickly became clear that “ownership” didn’t mean much, given how images could be shared, and that fraud was rife. CNN figured it would jump into NFTs… and then quickly jumped back out. And that was two months ago!
The third problem with Trump’s effort is that the whole thing is far more Trump Steak than Trump 2016. For all his obsession with presenting a glamorous lifestyle, his aesthetic has long been more Queen of Versailles than Versailles. And the art in the NFT line largely consists of clumsily Photoshopping Trump’s head onto manly, lanky figures — not necessarily the kind of thing that anyone might find worth an initial $99 investment.
To be fair, Trump’s initial pitch doesn’t dwell on the potential for the investment to grow over time, one of the reasons people got excited about NFTs in the first place. Instead, the first pitch presented on CollectTrumpCards.com comes off more like you’re being asked to buy a pack of baseball cards. After all, included in each sale is the chance to win an amazing prize, from dinner with Trump — “I don’t know if it’s an amazing prize,” Trump says in a video promoting the sale, “but that’s what we have.” — to an hour of golf with him to personal Zoom calls.
The commercial is very Trump. For example, he begins by speculating that he is probably the viewer’s favorite president of all time, more than Washington, more than Lincoln. It is a strange reminder that he our president, offering a jarring contrast to the sales pitch that follows. Is this what our favorite president is doing? Trying to get people to pony up $99 for a photo of Trump dressed as a NASCAR driver for some reason?
An image, mind you, that you “own” only conceptually. It’s kind of like those kiosks at the mall where you can buy pictures of Jesus doing different jobs, so you can, for example, get a mug of Jesus helping a school bus driver to give to your friend who drives a school bus. But then at least you got the mug.
When Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he found a way to generate a ton of money despite losing power. Through relentless e-mail appeals, he managed to raise tens of millions of dollars from supporters who believed they were helping him fight to keep his position. Now it seems he’s trying a new angle. He probably feels emboldened by the success of his coffee table book of photos from the presidency. If people pay $75 for that book (or more than $200 if signed!), why shouldn’t they pay $99 for these? One reason is of course that with the book you at least get the book.
(I really can’t stress enough how bad the Photoshopping is here.)
What’s really remarkable about this is that Trump is theoretically a candidate for the presidency. His campaign, announced last month, hasn’t really done much yet, to the frustration of his allies. But here he is, spending time hyping a product unrelated to the campaign, a product that lines his own pockets. (As has often been the case with Trump’s business ventures, he is licensing his name of the company that offers the NFTs.) He exploits the backers’ limited pool of good will and money for the benefit of himselfnot his alleged presidential campaign.
I got out of the Trump prediction game on November 8, 2016, so I won’t make any predictions about whether Trump’s NFT game will work. I will note, however, that Melania Trump tried to make waves with NFTs much closer to the market’s top – and ended up buying her own offering.
But then, it wasn’t a very cool picture of her dressed as a football player, standing at the “45” yard line. That plus the chance to be part of a “group Zoom call” with Trump? As Trump says in the video, $99 “doesn’t sound like a lot for what you get”!
The one-time owner of Trump University certainly wouldn’t steer you wrong.
