Trump Is George Washington, King of Hearts in Second Round of NFTs

Mark Niquette
Updated ·2 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump is back to hawking digital trading cards.

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The former president and frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination announced on his Truth Social platform, Facebook and Instagram that he’s launched a second series of $99 nonfungible token cards after offering an initial series last year with depictions such as his head atop cartoon super-hero figures.

The second installment of the Trump Digital Trading Card series includes depictions of the former president as George Washington, as in Emanuel Leutze’s painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” as a golden king chess piece holding a globe and a US flag, and as the king of hearts on a playing card.

The NFTs can be collected like baseball cards and stored digitally, and there’s an offer of prizes — including a ticket to a gala dinner with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida — for those who buy 47 or 100 cards.

The digital cards are not connected to Trump’s campaign, and the company offering them says on its website it’s not owned, managed or controlled by Trump, his company, or their affiliates. Trump gets paid under a license for use of his name and likeness, according to the website.

CIC Digital LLC, the Trump entity that sold the first series of NFTs, made $500,000 to $1 million on them last year, according to a financial disclosure report the former president filed last week.

Trump said in another post on his social media platform that he could have raised the price for the cards much higher “with a lot more money coming to me, but I didn’t choose to do so.” He complained that he would have been given “no nice guy credit” for it.

Sales of the first series of Trump digital trading cards have spiked by more than 200% in the past 24 hours, according to data compiled by the website Crypto Slam, after slumping the previous month.

Overall, the market for NFTs such as Bored Apes and CryptoPunks is on a downward trend as measured by trading volume, according to data collected by tracker DappRadar. Over the past month, top NFT marketplace Blur saw its trading volume drop by 45.0%, while volume was down by 66% for OpenSea.

--With assistance from Muyao Shen and Gregory Korte.

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