Phil Garber
4 min readAug 5, 2021
Photo by visuals on Unsplash

Three Card Monte Anyone

Sure To Be A Winner

Bone Spurs, that huckster, scoundrel, con man, flimflam, shill, grifter, costermonger and colporteur in charge, isn’t the first president to cash in on his name, just the most garish and greediest.

Among the scammer in chief’s recent snow jobs are fundraising letters, often sent to gullible, senior citizens, begging for help, with the note, printed in small type that only can be seen with a neutron microscope, that the donations will repeat monthly. And there is the legal defense fund set up supposedly to fight election fraud but really just fattens trump’s personal political action committee where the funds can be used for any of a number of rather questionable causes, like buying his son’s books and pocketing the profit or paying his daughter for consulting services which are about as necessary as a skateboard for a quadraplegic.

Now, Trump lovers can literally be card carrying trumpers by getting “Official Trump Cards,” the newest offering from the trump campaign. Like all good scams, the red and gold cards look like credit cards but the only credit they bring is to redirect you to the trump fundraising page.

The cost for the autographed cards isn’t noted, no surprise there, but they are really, really, really special as these special cards are “reserved for President Trump’s STRONGEST supporters” and will be carried by “Patriots all around the Country.”

“They will be a sign of your dedicated support to our movement to SAVE AMERICA, and I’m putting my full trust in you,” trump said in an e-mail.

Hold on to the card because one day it may be as valuable as the Honus Wagner baseball card that sold for $3.12 million in 2016 or maybe not. More likely it will go the way of my baseball trading card collection which my mother tossed in the trash, unceremoniously and without my approval because she said the boxes of cards were cluttering up the house and I didn’t need them anymore anyway.

There is so much more at the trumpstore.com for the committed trumpers where you can choose to waste your money from among 381 products, none of which is guaranteed to do anything, much like Trump University.

There is trump water, trump bedding, trump ties, trump suits and shirts, trump chandeliers and there was a trump line of steaks which lasted for about two months. And it is a family affair, with the Ivanka Trump clothing line that was the center of controversy when leading retailers like Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus dropped the fashion line in protest to her father’s presidential election.

My favorite is the trump, camopet bed for only $165 to go with the trump pet leash at $22. My next favorite is the garish (redundant) trump Bling clutch at $550. There are trump honeydippers which are good to drip honey or to clean out ex-presidential poop for $10; trump hats in red, grey, camo, white, light blue or the stunning, pink searsucker, $36; two pack of trump socks, $19.99; a trump gingerbread ornament, $15; and if you have a taste for them, two sets of trump jellybeans, for the low cost of just $14. And that is only the beginning.

You can buy a baseball card signed by trump, $2,500. An autographed MAGA hat, $4,995 or how about a Donald Trump Make America Great Again signed hat for $16,321 but at least it’s shipped at no charge, maybe.

Presidential Trading Cards are nothing new. In 1922, Haffner’s Big-Tayto-Loaf Bread came with three or more presidential cards. In 1977, Wonder Bread promoted its bread came with Star Wars trading cards with one for Darth Vader, looking for all the world like a certain former president (not really).

The presidential trading cards have not always been complimentary and they probably don’t bring in revenues to the ex-leader of the free world. They include the 1989 “Eclipse Rotten to the Core Donald Trump,” a series of 36 cards focused on such luminaries as Rudy Giuliani and of course, trump. The reverse of each card has a list of undesirable stats and ventures, with Trump’s card filling up every nook and cranny on the back of the cards.

Another popular trump item is the 1995 Playboy Chromium Covers, a series that celebrates the covers of Playboy magazine through the years. Trump appears on the cover of March 1990, alongside Brandi Brandt, the 1987, Playboy Playmate of the Month. An autographed copy of the trump, Brandt cover sold at auction for $4,900.

And nobody should do without the 2004 Topps Garbage Pail Kids series of cards, focusing on trump and his TV reality series “The Apprentice” with one car showing a child trump on a toilet and another trump look alike is reading a newspaper with the headline “You’re Fired!!”