Despite ban: Trump's face on the new dollar coin

 

Mia Holmberg Karlsson/TT 

Published 10.21Updated 14.58

 

The US Mint has launched dollar coins with President Donald Trump's portrait. The money looks like gold, but is made of zinc, manganese, nickel and copper. Photo: US Treasury Department via AP/TT

Donald Trump adorns buildings, perfumes and passports. And now also coins.

The US president puts his name and face everywhere. It raises criticism and questions - and fears about an increasingly authoritarian regime.

The newly launched Donald Trump coin, a special edition to mark the 250th anniversary of the US, is worth one dollar but is selling for considerably more than that.

On the US Mint's website, rolls of 25 coins are now being sold for 61 dollars and bags of 100 coins for 154.50. They can also be purchased at the government store in Washington, D.C., for $5 each.

The legality of the whole thing has been questioned by both Republicans and Democrats, according to The Washington Post.

The U.S. Treasury Department claims that the coin is perfectly legal — both as a collector’s item and a means of payment — citing a 2020 law that authorizes the production of coins “symbolic of the 250th anniversary of the United States” in 2026.

Trump Everywhere

But according to federal law and tradition in the United States, living people are not allowed to grace the country’s currency. The only president to do so is Calvin Coolidge, who put his face on a coin in connection with the nation’s 150th anniversary in 1926.

Donald Trump’s face has popped up in countless places during his second term: on passports, annual passes to national parks, and banners draped over government buildings. It’s drawing criticism. Putting your own name on “everything” is what autocrats around the world have done for centuries, history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat noted on NPR in March.

“That the leader must be everywhere, his face must be everywhere, his name must be everywhere, and his aesthetic, his taste must be reflected in buildings, in the people around him. The autocrat wants to remake the world in his own image,” she said.

“This self-aggrandizement, unprecedented in the history of the presidency, puts him in the company of conquerors and dictators,” read an analysis in The New York Times last year.

Bibles and shoes

The bill is paid by taxpayers, argues Democratic Senator Adam Schiff.

“Not only a terrible waste of the American people’s hard-earned dollars, but also an illegal use of public funds,” he wrote on X in July.

The proceeds from the coins go to the treasury, not to Trump himself. However, the profits from a series of cryptocurrencies and commercial products – including Bibles and golden shoes – that the Trump family has put their name on in recent years are controversial, to say the least, as the president's business dealings are enriching himself in industries that his own government shapes and regulates. A clear abuse of the presidency, say critics.

Facts

Commercial Trump products

During his current term in office, Donald Trump has earned large sums of money from products with the president's name and face on them: everything from Bibles, clothes and guitars to perfumes, watches and shoes, according to Business Insider.

The Trump family has also launched a mobile phone that seems to have gone up in smoke. Most of the approximately 590,000 Americans who paid a total of almost $60 million in deposits over a year ago are still waiting, according to The Verge and BBC.

Trump has also earned billions from cryptocurrencies through the family company World Liberty Financial (WLF) and so-called memcoin in his and his wife's names.

Last year, the president withdrew $1.2 billion – around 11.5 billion Swedish kronor – from cryptocurrency-related activities, according to official documents reported by the AP news agency, for example.