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It appears that Steve Bannon, former pal, advisor, and confidante of Donald Trump, is apparently done with Donald on the heels of Trump’s MyPillow guy Mike Lindell-esque “Trump Digital Trading Cards” infomercial. As I predicted, the NFT trading card series reportedly sold out on the first day, raising $4.45 million.We’ll hit that last little nugget later in the article.
Trump on Wednesday teased a “major announcement” for Thursday morning. His major announcement, he said, would come because “America needs a superhero.” On Thursday, that announcement came: Trump Digital Trading Cards. Yeah.
Incidentally, Trump’s “trading cards” are actually NFTs — non-fungible tokens — comprised of digital identifiers that can’t be copied, substituted, or subdivided, and are recorded in a blockchain. Sound familiar? Like cryptocurrencies, NFTs are worth ONLY what those who are silly enough to buy them think they’re worth. Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about how the crypto nightmare turned out for buyers who “invested” serious money in the pretend assets knows what I’m talking about.
Anyway, Trump’s latest bizarre episode might’ve been the proverbial straw that broke the back of Bannon’s on-again, off-again dedication to the former president.
“I can’t do this anymore,” the flabbergasted Bannon told colleagues Steve Cortes and Sebastian Gorka — who served as Trump’s Deputy Assistant to the President, and now hawks supplements in infomercials — on Thursday’s episode of Bannon’s podcast.
I can’t do this anymore. He’s one of the greatest presidents in history, but I gotta tell you: whoever – what business partner and anybody on the comms team and anybody at Mar-a-Lago … but we’re at war. They oughta be fired today. They came out with that was so important … and, hey — you don’t have three [bigger supporters] than Cortes, Bannon and Seb Gorka, and we’re getting blown up all day on this.
In one effort to defend Trump’s latest self-inflicted injury, legions of his followers took to social media and elsewhere to declare that Trump’s latest unforced error was only a “joke.” Yeah, not a joke.
Gorka, who shook his head as Bannon talked, then added his two cents, as transcribed by Newsweek:
Whoever wrote that, that pitch, should be fired. And should never be involved in any … I don’t want them making the presidential napkins for Mar-a-Lago … anybody who came up with that. If you want to do this kind of stuff, have a peon do it.
Get somebody who’s recognized in the MAGA world to, you know, put their face to this thing and do it. But the president should not be involved with this.
Far be it from me to agree with anything that comes out of Gorka’s opportunistic mouth, but he’s right.
The Bottom Line
Trump might continue to be skewered over his trading cards, but he counted on his legion of loyalists plopping down a hundred bucks a pop on his worthless NFTs, and he apparently counted right — although that is hardly a surprise, given his target market.