Reason # 28: Huckster
Why do we need to defeat Donald Trump and ensure that a Democrat occupies the White House?
What is a huckster? It originally defined an individual who pitched merchandise to individual house holders. Examples from my youth include the Fuller Brush man and the door-to-door bible salesman. In modern terms hucksterism carries the added connotation of false, flamboyant sales pitches with a stench of fraud. Relevant instances today are the myriads of boiler room scam phone calls and e-mails we are inundated with, on a daily basis and the cheesy commercials interspersed through B-movies on late night television. So how does this relate to Donald Trump?
Let’s start with an obvious example. You should be aware that dignified presidential candidate Donald Trump is an actual bible salesman, marketing his “God Save the U.S.A.” bible for $60 a copy.
But it gets much more squalid and frankly nutty. Donald Trump is also vending photoshopped NFT images of himself with light beaming from his eyes. If you are not familiar with “non-fungible tokens” or NFT’s don’t be too hard on yourself; I learned about them from my grandson. Wikipedia defines them as “unique digital identifiers, recorded on a blockchain”. Still not making any sense? As best I can make out, it’s kind of like cryptocurrency but in picture form. Let me give you an example.
When I was in grammar school, I would go to the store and buy a pack of fungible (replaceable by identical) Topp’s baseball cards and own five wonderful cards, containing on the front, a color image of a professional baseball player in uniform. On the back would be his listed his accomplishments in statistical form. I would own these cards forever and as a side-benefit, I had the right to trade them and would get to consume a delicious piece of pink bubble gum at no extra charge. The Trump NFTs are kinda similar, except that they feature images of Donald Trump as superman, cowboy, astronaut etc. in heroic poses. They sell for $99 dollars – each -, only ten thousand times more expensive than the roughly equivalent five Topp’s cards of Mickey Mantle, Jackie Robinson, Whitey Ford, Roy Campanella and Willie Mays. What a deal! The first edition sold out overnight. Prices for NFTs rose rapidly to over one thousand dollars.
Looked like another good investment for Trump devotees! The trading price of the initial series of images rose over the months, but second and third tranches fared less well. What are the images trading for currently? Well, um, I don’t know. Why? Seems they are not trading at all and were pulled off the market in March 2024? What does this mean? It is unclear, but I’m guessing that as usual, there is chicanery in the mix.
That did not end the Trump family dealings in shadowy cryptocurrency. “DJT coin tokens” plummeted from a worth of $55 million dollars to $3 million in less than an hour.
What in heaven’s name is a coin token? I again plead ignorance, suspecting that investors have yet again been bilked. But I will let Michael Hiltzig, the nonpareil investigative reporter for the LA Times, try to explain the bonkers business venture to you.
The crazier than imaginable narrative purportedly begins with a high school friend of Barron Trump and a verbal agreement between Barron and Martin Shkreli. Wait, that name sounds familiar. Yup, this is the same Shkreli who raised the price of a critical drug for treatment of dying AIDS patients to obscene levels and was sentenced to seven years in jail for financial skullduggery. Well, like a Batman villain, the boy genius is out of the can after six and a half years and back in the business world. According to Hiltzig, Shkreli claims that Barron hates his stepbrother Don Jr. and wanted to steal a march on him by moving into the crypto world before him. This led to a joint venture with Shkreli and issuance of DJT coin tokens. All went well. Actually, it only went well for fifteen minutes. Then someone (undetermined – remember this is all “crypto”) withdrew their money, Barron backed out and the DJT coin token venture cratered.
Is there any supportive evidence for this bizarre tale? It turns out that the part about Don Jr. wanting to go into cryptocurrency “in a big way” was accurate.
All of you Trump acolytes, be sure to invest; you know it’s going to end well when Don Jr. “takes on” the banking system.
But all of you sane folks out there in America. Are you really seriously considering wasting your vote on a dynasty of incompetent bunko artists?
Have a heart; use your mind, search your conscience, and vote for Democratic candidates – across the ballot – on November. 5th.
Please share this message with your friends and please, add your thoughts, to expand upon what are only brief sketches here.
Fred Grannis
August 14, 2024