Oh, you thought we were finished dunking on Trump’s collectible NFT trading cards? The ones that are so amateurish and narcissistic that they’re basically begging to be made fun of? Turns out—surprise surprise—they may be using stolen artwork!
Trump released the trading cards last week, after teasing a “major announcement” that most of us thought would have something to do with his 2024 presidential campaign. Instead, he announced the sale of 45,000 NFT images of himself in different costumes. The costumes include various infantile fantasies like an astronaut, a combination superhero/wrestler, a wild west sheriff, and a race car driver. Then, there are thousands and thousands of tacky, generic images of Trump wearing a tuxedo, or being surrounded by flying gold bars. Trump claimed that the cards sold out by Friday afternoon.
Now, there’s increasing evidence that the cards, which feature Trump’s head sloppily photoshopped onto various bodies, weren’t even made with licensed stock photos. TikTok user Saadia points out that the remnants of a Shutterstock watermark can be seen on Trump’s belt buckle in the air force pilot card.
The cowboy card, meanwhile, seems to have been made with an image of a jacket being sold on Amazon. If you look at the images in Matthew Sheffield’s tweet below, you can see that the brown jacket on Amazon was changed to white for the NFT. Even the model’s hands are the same.
Artist Clark Mitchell is credited as the creator of the NFTs, and although he hasn’t commented on the situation yet, he did retweet someone making fun of him, so who knows what’s real and what’s parody anymore?
Anyway, none of this new information is a huge shocker. Grifters gonna grift! If you’re one of the marks … uh, I mean, Trump fans who bought one of these cards (assuming the whole thing wasn’t a big money laundering scheme, which is one rumor drifting around social media), I hope you enjoy it? I don’t know what you’re going to do with a jpeg of a repulsive old man pretending to be an astronaut—and frankly, I don’t want to know.
(featured image: Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
