This is not parody.
Donald Trump is really doing this. It isn't something done in his name, or for him.
Trump is all in, personally.
Official Donald Trump Digital Trading cards
Yesterday, when I began to prepare this blog post, images of superhero Trump were available to buy for $99 each. There were apparently a hundred different images, and there were an unreported number of each of those images.
Trump's creation of these cards is a new level of grandiloquent grift, but that is only half of the over-the-top Trump-ness of the story. The other half is that overnight they sold out.
The video at CollectTrumpCards.com begins with Donald Trump saying:
Hello, this is Donald Trump. Hopefully your favorite president of all time, Better than Lincoln, Better than Washington. I'm doing my first Official Donald J. Trump NFT collection right here and right now. . . .
People snapped up images like these:
Two observations:
One is that there is no level of over-the-top self-promotion for Trump. There is no limit to his willingness to monetize his supporters. There is no top so there is no over. Trump is beyond parody. Could he sell toenail clippings gathered from Mar-a-Lago staff, and call them his own, and sell them? I think he could.
The second is better understanding why Republican candidates choose to destroy their own campaigns by clinging to Trump. The close-at-home case on point for me is why a nonpartisan Medford, Oregon mayor, a career police officer, and a Republican candidate for Oregon state senate would choose to lose a winnable election. Randy Sparacino only needed to say that he wasn't totally Trump-blind and that he didn't agree with a wild proposition announced by local Republican party officers who called Biden an illegitimate president. He could have won with a mumble that gave local voters some glimmer that Sparacino was not drinking Trump Kool Aid. He didn't do it.
The explanation is in the "sold out" notice. The votes he might have won by showing himself to be a reasonable, fact-based, supporter of orderly government might well be overwhelmed by the votes he would risk within the Trump-supporting GOP electorate. Sparacino isn't stupid. He wasn't trying to lose. He was trapped by his GOP voters and by the GOP state leadership that paid for his million-dollar campaign. Too many of them don't think Trump posing in a cowboy duster or superhero costume and calling himself greater than Lincoln and Washington is laughable and weird.
If these are like baseball cards I want to see the back with his stats! Things like: number of lies told, number of impeachments, number of wives, number of affairs, jobs lost during his term. All numbers where he's leading in the Presidential Hall of Fame!
Now that we know people will gladly pay $99 for nothing, can we expect the endless river of infomercials for gadgets to increase their ask from $19.99 to $99? Seriously, this guy is galactic level con artist. He knows his suckers.