Before we get to the fullest revelation yet of the essence of Donald Trump, or so they're saying, some of you probably need to know what an NFT is.
So, being otherwise at sea myself, I'll regurgitate and expound on verbiage I found with Google.
An NFT is a non-fungible token. That is, or can be, a digital image that, like the Mona Lisa of paint-on-canvas primitiveness, can't be replicated. It's an original thing, owned only among a special few, thus conceivably worth something someday because sometimes rareness is a big deal.
Imagine that it's 2064 and somebody is lucky enough to have in their private cloud a December 2022 original of Trump's face pasted with photo-editing software onto a body with bared six-pack abs.
An NFT is non-fungible in that it can't be passed around willy-nilly for free like an everyday digital link. It gets put in a "blockchain" where it can be exchanged for cryptocurrency.
I can tell you that a blockchain is a digital database and closed network. Cryptocurrency is an alternative and digital form of currency that might be exchanged within a blockchain for these non-fungible digital tokens.
What you do is set up somehow this little digital club and then you put bona fide original digital images in there and then trade for them with whatever they'll bring and do so with these real-money substitutes.
There's an algorithm involved. There may be some encryption taking place as well.
Or something. I don't what the hell I'm keyboarding here. And I don't care.
These NFTs and cryptocurrency have kind of crashed from seemingly bizarre peaks in 2021. Even if they hadn't, I would not be in the market for a digital image of Donald Trump as Superman. Or as anybody, especially himself.
And as long as payrolls and Social Security come in dollars, I'll endure all the "OK, boomer" ridicule you youngsters can dish and do my budgeting in those.
Actually, though, I haven't actually had physical possession of any dollars in paper form in a good while. Instead I just stick the chip end of a plastic card into a slot or else point my phone to a scanning device. It works for me in that it lets me walk out of the grocery store with food without getting arrested.
So, about Trump: Last week he put on social media a video in which he called himself a greater president than Lincoln or Washington and urged people to ante up $99 for these baseball-card-like digital images of him as heroic figures. Buyers also get chances at a Zoom call from Trump as well as being his dinner guest, as if an honorary white supremacist.
Apparently the scheme must be seeded with real dollars, and Trump gets all those.
They say he netted more than $4 million the first day these works of art were on the market, which just goes to show that P.T. Barnum was mired in understatement when he supposedly said in the mid-19th century that there is a sucker born every minute.
A fool born every second is surely what the showman would have quantified if Trump had been alive at the time.
People long expressing deep ridicule and disdain for Trump have been saying that, though they have heretofore felt fully validated in those views, never had they seen such a lay-down hand of evidence as Trump gave them with this NFT spectacle.
An art critic's column in the Washington Post on Saturday put it this way: "Along with laughter, however, was the pervasive sense that this newest scheme has distilled the essence of Trump to its purest form. It was 'on brand' in a way more telling and disturbing than previous efforts to cash in on a name once associated with the Oval Office."
I never thought of Trump in the context of the Oval Office. I wrote repeatedly when he was in it that it was preposterous that he was there.
The art critic presumably meant that these images-for-sale are in keeping with Trump but achieve a new depth even for him. I suspect that means the latest spectacle reveals more clearly than ever--exceeding the powerful clarity before--that Trump is a shameless, laughable, incorrigible, delusional huckster and egomaniac and that he is likely, subject to the medical particulars, crazy.
And, to boot, quite possibly broke.
When I placed the immediately preceding sentences or something close to them on social media over the weekend, a respondent quipped that he'd thought the scheme was nothing more than a way for Trump to launder foreign money.
But I've never thought of Trump as criminal. I must defend him. I don't think he's smart enough for that, and that his crime, if you want to call it that, is garish ridiculousness.
Which reminds me of another social media respondent. He said the biggest fraud in the Trump images is that, in all of them, Trump has large hands.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.