With Trump’s NFT Trading Cards Grift, the hyper-commercialization of Christmas is complete

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Don’t get me wrong, the world has always had problems. But, for example, in the early 1990s, you could look at something like apartheid and think, “That’s messed up – that makes sense in a way, but racist people exploiting other people for their own gain – we definitely have some work to do .”

Then you’d kind of go about your day, do what little you could to help here and there, and things would gradually improve somewhat over time.

But today, although most of our scandals and crises are measurably less bad than the big problems of the past (at least in terms of loss of life and limb), things feel different. I don’t remember ever having this feeling before which has only become constant over the last few years. Different people have different experiences with it, but I can best articulate it as something like, “This is what’s happening now? This makes no sense. Wow, we are a stupid and bad species.”

There is nothing new about the inherent horribleness of what is happening – again, things were objectively more horrible at almost any point in the past – it is the sheer disconnect between cause and effect, the outright rejection of reason in the embrace of complete madness.

For the numerical majority of the country, this appears to have started when Donald Trump first walked down the fake escalator and said he was running for president. To anyone but his supporters, it made no sense that a loudmouthed, mean, proudly stupid, outright racist, backward-thinking and appearance liar who had not only been credibly accused of sexual assault by dozens of women, but had bragged about it. on tape would be elected president.

Such surreal moments have piled up over the past six or seven years, not all from Trump, but all in his style. As pressure and time can compress a lump of raw carbon into a diamond, each layer of bullshit added more weight until our society just became one big, highly concentrated bullshit diamond.

I think we just, maybe, peaked. Twice impeached, now subject to criminal referrals by a House committee, among a million other indisputable wrongs committed by Trump and the people close to him, Trump decides to release thousands of $99 Trump-themed NFT trading cards. “Remember Christmas is coming and this is a great Christmas present,” Trump said in his “big announcement.”

Despite the NFT stunt being widely derided as sad and desperate, the NFTs sold out within 24 hours. Not only did all 44,000 of Trump’s digital trading cards sell out within 24 hours, prices skyrocketed on the secondary market. As of December 20, there had been $8.7 million in secondary market trades of Trump-themed NFTs.

It makes sense that Trump, a grifter, would continue to ask his supporters to give him their money for virtually nothing in return. It makes sense that maybe a few backers would commit.

Still, it just boggles the rational mind that tens of thousands of people would shell out more than $4.3 million within 24 hours to ingest worthless Photoshop projects of Donald Trump. The artwork for many of these NFTs was not even generated for the project, it was allegedly taken without compensation from the artists who created it.

The only conclusion I can come to, to keep some of my sanity intact, is that there is trouble all the way down. On December 18, the average sale price for one of these Trump NFTs on the secondary market rose as high as $680. Prices have since fallen. As of December 20, the cheapest Trump NFT available on the secondary market appeared to be listed for around $255 – still more than two and a half times the original purchase price of $99. I think most people who buy these things don’t really want to own them, as evidenced by secondary market sales that exceed the original sales volume within days. People are waiting to pass these NFTs on to even bigger suckers with huge profits on the secondary market.

“Give me a lot of money for a fake picture of me that doesn’t even exist in the real world so you can use it to harass other supporters of mine who are late to the game,” isn’t exactly Christmas spirit I can take with me. memories from Dickens. Although we are going to change some naming conventions, I like “Griftember”.

I do not know. Do your best. Try enjoying Griftember from the center of this bullshit diamond. It probably wouldn’t hurt to avoid pointlessly wasting money and instead just spend some time with the people you care about.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your debt-free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide range of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically knowledgeable. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nevertheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization he is affiliated with. He didn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].