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Don’t get me wrong, the world has always had problems. But in, say, the early 1990s, you could look at something like apartheid, and think, “That’s messed up — sort of makes sense though, racist people exploiting other people for their own gain — we’ve definitely got some work to do.”
Then you’d kind of go on with your day, do what little you could to help here and there, and things would gradually improve somewhat over time.
Today, though, even as most of our scandals and crises are measurably less bad than large-scale problems of the past (at least in terms of loss of life and limb), things feel different. I don’t remember previously having this feeling that has just become constant over the past few years. Different people have different experiences with it, but I can best articulate it as something like, “This is what is going on now? This doesn’t make any sense. Wow, we’re a dumb and bad species.”
It’s not something new about the inherent horribleness of what goes on — again, things were objectively more horrible at almost any point in the past — it’s the sheer disconnect between cause and effect, the outright rejection of reason in embrace of utter insanity.
For the numerical majority of the country, this all seems to have started when Donald Trump first descended that fake-gold escalator and said he was running for president. To everyone other than his supporters, it made no sense that a loudmouthed, mean, proudly stupid, outwardly racist, backward-thinking and -looking liar who’d 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 piled on over the past six or seven years, not all of them from Trump, but all in his style. Like 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, reached the apex. Twice-impeached, now subject to criminal referrals by a House committee, among a million other indisputable wrongs Trump and the people close to him have committed, Trump decides to release thousands of $99 Trump-themed NFT trading cards. “Remember Christmas is coming and this makes a great Christmas gift,” said Trump in his “major announcement.”
Despite the NFT stunt being widely mocked as sad and desperate, the NFTs sold out within 24 hours. Not only did all 44,000 of the Trump digital trading cards sell out within 24 hours, prices skyrocketed on the secondary market. As of December 20, there had been $8.7 million worth of secondary market trades of the Trump-themed NFTs.
It makes sense that Trump, a grifter, would continue to ask his supporters to give him their money for essentially nothing in return. It makes sense that perhaps a few supporters would oblige.
Yet, it just confounds the rational mind that tens of thousands of people would shell out more than $4.3 million within 24 hours to obtain intrinsically worthless Photoshop projects of Donald Trump. The artwork for many of these NFTs wasn’t even generated for the project, it was reportedly taken without compensation from the artists who created it.
The only conclusion I can come to, in order to keep some semblance of my sanity intact, is that it’s grifts 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 fallen since. As of December 20, the cheapest Trump NFT available on the secondary market appeared to be listed for about $255 — still more than two-and-a-half times the original $99 purchase price. I think the majority of the people buying these things don’t really want to own them, as evidenced by secondary market sales outpacing the original sale’s volume within a matter of days. People are waiting to pass these NFTs off to even bigger suckers at a huge profit 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 grift other supporters of mine who are late to the game,” is not exactly the Christmas spirit takeaway I remember from Dickens. Although if we’re going to change some naming conventions, I do like “Griftember.”
I don’t know. Do your best. Try to enjoy Griftember from the center of this bullshit diamond. Probably wouldn’t hurt to avoid senselessly 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 variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
Christmas, Donald Trump, Finance, Griftember, Holidays and Seasons, Jonathan Wolf, NFTs
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