Donald Trump has an important message for us all.
It seems to be real, unbelievably. Except that these aren’t actually cards — they’re digital images that you ‘purchase’ as NFTs. There’s more ego on display at the website.
Who would be so tasteless and tacky to order any of these? We’ll probably find out.
OMG. There’s a video.
Well, for once he’s being truthful.
They’ll be gone quickly – like other cryptohogwash. All that’ll remain will be the prosecutions.
I’ll take one of these:
https://ftw.usatoday.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/90/2015/12/screen-shot-2015-12-10-at-3-09-17-pm.png
No I won’t, they’re free on the internet.
Crying laughing here. That “hunter” pic though, looks as if he’s ready to be “peppered” by Dick Cheney.
Also, now that the “build the wall” grift is over, I guess the Trumpists need a new means of fleecing idiot believers of their money.
How appropriate. Traitor cards.
You’re calling him a fruit loop , well that’s nicer than what I usually call him
Larry…I was wondering what the big “T” stands for on the card where he shows his undershirts a la Superman. Traitor. Twerp. There are probably others that I can’t think of.
OK, Photoshop-capable comardes! You know what to do: Come up with parody images depicting lard-ass trump in various humiliating poses. Sell the psuedo-NFTs with all proceeds going to causes the fascists HATE!
edit: …comrades!
Hehehe, “RUMP TOWER”
Do they really cost $99? Maybe that’s a typo: $.99? I don’t know anything about this sort of thing.
You talk about an ego problem. It’s one advantage of being 5′ 2″ tall. You tend to be more reality-based when it comes to your self-image.
That’s not at all homoerotic.
Come up with parody images depicting lard-ass trump in various humiliating poses.
Tell your art AI “in the style of tom of Finland” and enjoy what comes out.
Just getting started here.
Elon Musk already has his own cryptocurrency, named after him as ELONGOAT, set up by his fanboys.
“Updated 15 December 2022: Current price of Elon GOAT is USD $0.000306074933 with a 24-hour trading volume of $16088.40. EGT price is down -13.1% in the last …” Higher than I would have guessed at .03 cents.
So, how long until Donald Trump starts his own cryptocurrency? TrumpMAGA coins are going to seriously cut into the Elon GOAT market share.
Hmm, does that collection include one where he adresses the crowds at Nürnberg?
« Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite. »
Well, there go whatever shreds of dignity he had left.
Is this how he launders money from Saudi or something?
I found that absolutely hilarious, and given that it’s Trump, totally unsurprising.
I like the one where he had his thumb shoved up the hoohah of the Statue of Liberty, very appropriate.
Very much like a baseball card, except there’s no baseball and it’s not a card.
I think this is symbolic of the Trump presidency somehow, in some way that I don’t feel like thinking about just now.
The Homelander was also a narcissist but crucially, he was a competent villain.
BTW I like the Tom of Finland idea 😊
They make perfect Gifs.
Once again, he does something in attempt to trigger people who hate him and get people talking about him, good, bad or indifferent publicity.
Mission accomplished it seems.
When will this ever end? When can we stop paying attention to him?
Isn’t there an Elba Island somewhere we can send him?
@ 24
The Falklands are boggy and desolate, mostly inhabited by sheep and penguins. There are not many potential scam victims around.
I desperately hope some Democratic intern has saved a copy of that video. Given Dolt 45’s announcement that he will run for president in 2024, I personally can’t wait to see the attack ads…
@8 Do you remember the “if Bush (Dubya) was a girl” meme? Complete with Photoshopped images (some including Dick Cheney given a similar treatment.) My first thought, upon seeing the images for the first time, was “MY EYYYYYES, OH GOD THE PAIN, MAKE IT STOP” but part of me really hopes those “cards” get a similar treatment. Sadly, those images seem to have been scrubbed from the internet. Although that might be for the best.
@13 OH GOD MY EYYYYYES
@20 Have you ever seen Alex Ross’s “Sucking Democracy Dry”?
https://www.previewsworld.com/Catalog/JAN063157
The only thing digital Trump needs is a digital exam with an ice auger.
Akira @8:
Those cards are so awful, so self-parodying and humiliating, that I don’t think I could come up with any more embarrassing than those.
Ardepithecus @17:
His dignity sailed off into the sunset decades ago. Whatever shred that was left in his body fled to a foreign country (not Russia) and applied for asylum as soon as he made this advert.
========================
I feel so sorry for satirists. Trump has, long-ago, reached the point at which he is self-satirizing. Or sanitizing. Or satanizing.
Raven @14: I don’t think it’s fair to say that ElonGOAT is Musk’s cryptocurrency. As far as I’m aware, it was just a couple of cryptobros who came up with it and named it after him in an attempt to get him to endorse it.
I love the picture of “RUMP TOWER” so much it almost makes me want to … nah!
From now on it’s (former) President Rump!
No purchase necessary for the sweepstakes, so I heartily encourage all Americans to enter. My favourite prize-ish is an hour of golf. Not a round of golf, an hour.
BARF!!!!!!!
Looks like a cross between Homelander and Stormfront (comic version) from The Boys. All too appropriate that they’re a psychopath and Nazi respectively.
This is some kind of dare right?
Most likely, Trump claimed he could become even more of a clown and still get the Republican nomination.
suggested alternatives
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/15/2142027/-Trump-s-major-announcement-was-just-about-a-set-of-collective-cards-SO-I-MADE-SOME-OF-MY-OWN
This is a money-laundering scheme. What is the point of this except as a way to funnel money to him, especially from overseas? It not only provides him with cash, but it also allows you to claim that you weren’t funding his campaign or legal fees or whatever it is you think might taint you. Just like his real estate deals with the Russians that Eric admitted to.
Constantly calling himself better than Lincoln and Washington, hasn’t that got to even piss off his own supporters?
Remember, folks. Those worshipping the Great Donald, claiming that he is the best president EVARRR!!! are the same ones who claimed that Obama did irreparable harm to the office of the President when he allowed himself to be photographed in shirtsleeves. If shirtsleeves is irreparable harm to the Presidency, they what are these ‘trading cards’ even if it is an ex-President?
Duplicated from the Infinite Thread:
Trump’s Badly Photoshopped NFTs Appear to Use Photos From Small Clothing Brands
Can’t wait for the ‘bright orange prison jumper’ image to round out the set.
@14, @29:
That ElonGoat cryptocurrency ($EGT) is even more pathetic than described. Some Musk fans spent $600,000 creating a hideous statue of Musk’s head on top of a goat’s body riding a rocket, and then drove it down to Austin Texas to parade it outside Telsa HQ in the hopes that Musk would acknowledge their existence and thus causing (by crypto magic, I assume) their currency to soar in value, instantly making them millions of dollars.
Judging from the chart of the $EGT over the past few weeks, it would seem that even Musk has limits when it come to basking in the adulation of his fanboys, and has been a no show.
Perhaps the craziest thing about this is that they “created” nine billion coins, and of course, there’s zero information on how many they actually made available to general public. In all likelihood, they are sitting on well over 90% of them, dreaming of the day Musk embraces their currency and the price shoots up to one dollar (I mean, any cryptocurrency can get to a measly dollar, am I right?), instantly making them billionaires. This is exactly how the cryptoscam works — invent a coin, pump it up and then dump it for a fortune before the people you suckered into it realize what’s going on. The site tracking $EGT is tracking almost 10,000 cryptocurrencies.
Though the “fully diluted market cap” (i.e. if all 9 billion coins were in circulation) is currently “worth” $2,705,266, without people willing to buy billions of coins from them, it’s essentially worthless.
self-Promo Prostitutes abound:
tRUMP selling make-believe narcisstic trading cards
and
SinEnema selling tacky athletic gear online
and
To extend the WKRP meme, I’m waiting for ex-gov Hucksterbee to start selling ‘Parting the Red Sea Steak Knife Sets’ for $19.95 on TV.
And, fruitloops is such an appropriate term. They are full of killer sugar, horrible coloring, fractionated flour and NO NUTRITIONAL VALUE. Flashy but completely useless pablum just like tRUMP and SinEnema.
@ ^ shermanj : Sugar? Nothing too sweet about them – more bitter & sour I’d say. leave a very nasty taste in one’s mouth metaphorically speaking.
@3. silvrhalide : “Crying laughing here. That “hunter” pic though, looks as if he’s ready to be “peppered” by Dick Cheney.”
Saw Vice the other night. Grim & infuriating but good viewing.
@24. Captain Kendrick : “Isn’t there an Elba Island somewhere we can send him?”
Doens’t have to be an island as long as its a nice isolated jail wher ehe can stew for the rest of his life in his own intolerable company with no adulation or media and popular attention until he finally dies in disgrace. May that happen ASAP please.
Captain Kendrick @ #24 — He’s already on Elba. It’s called Mar-a-logo. This is another part of his plot to raise money, escape Elba, assemble an army of rabid supporters, return to Paris, and engage in more slaughter for his tin-pot ambitions. They should send him to St. Helena or some other desolate place in the middle of nowhere…he’s a real no-where man.
A bit OT, but Twitter just banned tech reporters from CNN, NYT and WaPo and others for no disclosed reason.
Elon Musk’s Twitter bans accounts of CNN, NYT, WaPo journalists
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/15/media/twitter-musk-journalists-hnk-intl/index.html
That SuperHero one has a camel-toe.
robro: Chateau d’If? Oh wait, that’s for the innocent…
Why do I have this vision in my mind of Putin ordering his people to order, oh, a million of these, pay for it with crypto currency, and when Trump gets his cut, he’s now even more under his thumb?
Am I being too cynical, or not cynical enough?
@7, @28: The “T” is obviously a reference to both Himself and his grandfather’s native tongue: Teufel. Which fits right in with Satanists…
What I’m really waiting for is someone to publish a hack/solution to the “hard” math making up the particular blockchain variant used for NFTs. Then we’d have the best of all worlds:
Cryptobros actually getting scared
Techbros crying because their collections of 21st-century equivalent of never-unboxed 1981-vintage Star Wars action figures had been laser-scanned and reproduced in such large quantity that the collections were worthless
Actual, prosecutable claims of fraud and false advertising (if you sell something proclaiming scarcity, and the purchaser reasonably relies on those proclamations without reasonable notice of their falsity, you’ve got a few lawsuits to look forward to)
Amusement value, especially if some kid from Compton finances a real education by selling counterfeit NFTs
Actually from what I have read THIS is the bridge too far for many of his supporters. Who would have thought it?
I want the one of him being led around on a collar and chain by Putin.
Elba’s rather pleasant – a Mediterranean island of reasonable size owned by Italy. I attended an academic conference there. And Napoleon came back from there for his 100 days.
Hey, no fair on the Falklanders, many of whom will remember the last two invasions by puffed-up tyrants*. If it has to be somewhere UK-owned, there’s St. Helena, where Napoleon ended his days, or how about Rockall? But really, he’s an American problem, and the USA has various “guano islands”, acquired in the 1800s: I suggest Johnson Atoll, where the huge quantities of (bird) shit that were once its pride have been mined out, and which has already been used for the disposal of toxic waste.
*Galtieri and then Thatcher.
Nah. To them, Washington and Lincoln are just the Abraham and Moses to Trump’s Jesus.
Jaws, @50:
Be careful what you wish for – if somebody manages that, then pretty much all digital encryption (including every password database in the world, and the whole of the banking network) goes too, beacuse it’s all based on the same fundemental mathematics.
The collections are already worthless.
Pretty much everybody seems to be labouring under a fundmental misapprehension as to what NFTs actually are. An NFT is not an image (or other digital asset) – an NFT is basically just a receipt, containing a link to some URL. It does not in any sense guarantee that the thing linked to is unique, or necessarily convey any ownership rights to it. It also doesn’t guarantee that the thing linked to today is the same as the thing it linked to yesterday, or that there’s anything on the end of the link at all. It’s just another kind of cryptotoken – the “non-fungible” bit just means that the token itself is unique (well, unique-ish, but lets not get into that), unlike “traditional” cryptocurrencies where any bitcoin is the same as any other.
The really funny thing is that the idea of using a link as the payload to make the token non-fungible was (as far as I understand it) very much a last-minute, late-night kludge that everybody involved at the time knew was a bad idea and figured they’d get around to replacing with something better once they got the initial proof-of-concept done.
I see this sort of thing and I am terrified.
Sure, it’s laughable crap, but it’s very clever. The target audience are the alienated young men, the Hitler Jugend as it were, of the rising tide of (in this case) American fascism. The pseudo-tech bro, fashy haircut, dapper Nazi, “the Jews will not replace us” marchers, the sneering spoilers and wreckers, Reddit fascists, edgelords, incels, homophobes, transphobes, Christian Side Hugger fake youth culture religio-loons, race “realists” whose counterfactual views have been weaponised and reinforced on the internet, the For the LULZ crowd of cackling KEKers, drinkers of liberal tears and so on and so forth. These people are a reasonable voting block, not enormous, but motivated, dangerous, and young enough that courting them pays off for decades of elections. Courting the religious right (as was done by Reagan) was still paying off for Bush (and after).
We’re not dealing with the universe’s most thoughtful and educated people. The popularity of Marvel movies, of Elon worship etc makes NFTs and cartoonishness seem cool. The Trumpians (and Johnsonites over here) have been palling around with the Bannons and Farages and various others. They are looking for vulnerable conventions to ignore, and manipulatable populations to exploit.
This NFT crap doesn’t have to succeed. It doesn’t have to be more than a mockable failure because we are not the target audience. REALITY is not the target audience. Your Trumpy Grandma is not likely to be buying an NFT (or if she is, it’s because she thinks it supports Trump, not because she is likely to engage with that cultural phenomenon as a fanboi). Your fashy proto-Spencer is.
However much the figurehead of this political group is a laughable moron, not everyone associated with him is. This is a moron sufficiently well supported by people with strategic minds and fingers on various social pulses to have brought a country close to fascism. Doubt me? The same is happening here. The Overton window has swung so far to the authoritarian/cult of personality mode that people are in genuine danger. Trump-like figures (See also: Johnson, Giuliani, Rees-Mogg, Patel, Braverman, Hunt, Hancock, Gove….etc) are not the people you let near power, if elected, they are the ones you stick at the back of parliament/congress and put someone near them to wipe up the dribble.
NFTs are a joke. They way they are being used here isn’t.
Louis
@Dunc
Bingo! Unless differently noted (which is very rare), it doesn’t convey any ownership. If you buy a car or Luis Vuitton handbag, you can make a video with it. You own it and you get a receipt and you can record a YouTube video driving/wearing it. You can do whatever you want with it, because it is yours. Sell it, destroy it, vandalize it, paint it blue… This is as if you didn’t buy a product but you bought a receipt from the person owning it. Or bought a PS5 box without PlayStation 5 inside.
“See, I own a Luis Vuitton handbag. I have a receipt and everything!”
“Where’s your bag?”
“It’s at home, but I have a receipt for it, see?”
“May I see the bag?”
“No, but you can see the receipt.”
“Do you have the picture of the bag at your home?”
“No, but you can see the receipt.”
And so on and so forth…
You don’t get the product, you don’t get to use the product, you only get potential bragging rights rewards from owning a receipt for the product.
Aaaaaaand they’re “SOLD OUT”. Everything on the website? SOLD OUT. Sweepstakes you can enter without having to make any purchase? SOLD OUT!
How do sweepstakes get “SOLD OUT” and not “ENDED”?
How can you run out of ‘Digital tokens’?
Do you think a lawyer advised him it looked shady? Or a political adviser told them it looks bad? I am dying to know!
Marvel movies are part of the downfall of society?
Cute. And now his own video announcement has disappeared.
I imagine he’s raging around Mar-A-Lago right now, furious that his scheme has made him even more of a laughing stock.
If we’re going to send Trump into exile on an island, I recommend Plum Island. It’s close to New York, after all.
Dunc@57,
So, basically, the end of capitalism. I must get to work on a “constructive and efficient solution to an NP-complete problem”. Marx, Schmarx – all we need is a single paper in Theoretical Computer Science!
Further to #62, Charles Stross’s The Atrocity Archives, the first of the “Laundry Files” series, it turns out that P=NP has been repeatedly proved (first by Alan Turing), but the discovery has always been suppressed, with the discoverers given compulsory job offers in the secret services. The equations involved also turn out to be the key to magical powers (hence the suppression) – the “Laundry” is the part of the UK’s secret services dealing with occult threats.
I was about to note myself that the video was replaced by a message stating ‘This video contains content from One Digital Entertainment, who has blocked it on copyright grounds’. Hmm, One Digital Entertainment looks to be in Mumbai, and maybe some sort of Indian version of Twitch?
@Dunc, jo1storm:
I like the description I’ve heard before. “Instead of DRM-less content, NFTs are content-less DRM.”
@ birgerjohannsen #25 & PZ #61
I see your suggestions and raise you a Tristan da Cunha. On second thought….naah. Thats not fair to the Tristand da Cunhanites. But for the rest of us. The post-ship arrives every two weeks and (I guess) no internet
Oh, crap! They’ve taken down the video PZ embedded!
@ 64 jenorafeuer, I really like the comment about NFT’s, DRM and content.
According to this article, the Trump NFT collection really did sell out.
There were 45,000 tokens minted.
At $99 a token or unit, that would be $4,500,000 worth sold originally.
Now, supposedly they are on the market and worth a lot more.
“One of these rare trading cards, of the 45th president standing in front of the Statue of Liberty holding a torch, is currently listed at 20 ETH, or about $24,000.” I’d rather have the $24,000 but maybe that is just me.
Just because the original NFT artwork effectively comes with an indisputable Certificate Of Authenticity embedded in the Blockchain, doesn’t make a bit of difference in practice unless someone is actually checking the CsOA. As long as you have the certificate, you can make all the copies you like and show them off without fear of them getting lost, damaged or stolen, because the Certificate Of Authenticity itself is the really valuable thing.
But even if you don’t have the COA, you can still make a copy of the artwork, which will be convincing enough right up until the moment someone demands to see the certificate.
And since historically the art itself has always been the important thing, because it was always hard enough to reproduce exactly that it might as well have been its own COA, most people simply aren’t used to asking to see certificates of authenticity for works of art. (Just like they aren’t used to the idea of other visitors to an Internet page seeing completely different advertisements from themselves, which has its own separate issues for another day …..)
Which means you can make and show off “fake” copies of NFT artwork without the actual NFT which proves their authenticity; and most people simply won’t bother to check they are not “real”. You would only really need to check the authenticity if you were buying it for yourself, or paying a non-negligible fee to look at it. And if somebody honestly doesn’t mind seeing a reproduction as long as it’s faithful, they aren’t going to check the certificate to prove it’s real.
I think we’re back to a version of the situation with the 1980s poster shops, with metre-big lithographic reproductions that are obviously not “real” but the picture is so good anyway, and so faithfully reproduced thanks to the printing process, the fact of it not being the original hardly matters; except now, the picture itself isn’t the important bit. The important bit is some boring string of digits almost nobody wants to be bothered to check, or even remember is important.
TLDR: Almost nobody else besides the holder of an NFT proving the authenticity of an associated image gives a stuff about authenticity.
You noticed that too, eh? With slashing lines on the legs, so that the one on the crotch doesn’t look too out of place.
I have to wonder if the artist made other choices to mock their subject in the other images. Not just bad art, but deliberately bad art.
In the hunter one, the head looks just slightly too small, or the hat too big, or something like that. I got the visual impression of a kid wearing clothing too big for him.
In the double-thumbs-up picture, he looks like he’s leaning forward awkwardly. There’s a bright light on the flag right behind him — maybe some sort of fart joke?
Am I just seeing things?
The world baffles me in increasin* amounts.
In the UK, Trump aka Fart is possibly even funnier than Rump.
Why would anyone pay for a a bit of photoshopped stolen artwork – follow the link above to the clothing companies.
Just take screenshot ?????
This has got to be parody or a deep fake video of Trump, right? Right? I don’t think Trump has this level of meta humor in him, and there can’t be anybody that thought this was a good, serious idea. (On the other hand, if the website isn’t fake, it seems they’ve already sold out, so…)
Trump has always been deeply vulnerable to anything that appeals to his pocket and his ego, so if the ones who came up with this grift offered him a percentage of the gross take of selling NFTs of pictures of himself, he’d probably go for it. He’s so narcissistic, he probably thought everyone on the right would love this stuff as much as his biggest fans would — or at least not vocally hate it.
bluerizlagirl, @ #69: As far as I understand it, NFTs (as standard) do not contain any mechanism to verify the authenticity of the associated image. They do not contain a hash of the file, and even if they did, a copy of the file would have the same hash. They’re literally just a receipt containing a URL. The only thing they verify is the transaction.