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The greening of the Reflecting Pool. Slapping his name onto the Kennedy Center. The partial demolition of the White House. The fighting arena on the White House lawn.
Even his face on some people’s passports!
Donald Trump’s latest tribute to himself is in on American money. And no, we don’t just mean skyrocketing prices.
The commemorative token is a vanity $1 gold coin featuring his face, ostensibly to celebrate 250 years of America.
Your sleep paralysis demon’s favorite coin is coming out soon
This week, the Trump regime unveiled the final design for what is supposedly an America 250 commemorative token.
It is a $1 gold coin, The Guardian details.
One side is fairly straightforward, reading “United States of America” and “One Dollar” around the Great Seal of the United States.
The other side bears an approximation of Trump’s face, giving him more hair and less face-and-neck than the real thing.
Next to his stern countenance it conspicuously reads “In God We Trust.” That’s on all money, Constitution be damned, but it’s a little brazen when placed right beside Trump’s approximate likeness.
The US Mint will begin striking a $1 gold coin featuring President Trump, announces Treasury Secretary Bessent.
— Steve Herman (@newsguy.bsky.social) July 15, 2026 at 6:56 AM
There are, obviously, so many issues with this.
The first has to be that no living President in United States history has been depicted on money in this manner while alive. It’s also pretty specifically illegal.
In 1866, the Thayer Amendment outlawed the appearance of any living person on “the bonds, securities, notes, or postal currency of the United States.”
However, there was a close call on a half-dollar coin in 1926, depicting then-President Calvin Coolidge alongside President George Washington. Coolidge was alive at the time, but it was a commemorative coin — seemingly an exception.
In 2005, the Presidential $1 Coin Act specifically prohibited any coin from bearing “the image of a living former or current President.”
Won’t someone stop him?
A couple of years ago, SCOTUS effectively declared that Trump was a king of sorts.
In recent years, the conservative majority on the court have consistently ruled that Trump, specifically, has broad executive powers and is largely immune to prosecution for acts taken in office.
It turns out that Nixon was kind of right: in the eyes of these six individuals, if the president does it, it’s not illegal.
(Of course, this is the same crowd who said that Biden couldn’t forgive student loans. These broad executive powers don’t seem to apply to every POTUS.)
We mention this to point out that Trump is doing this because he doesn’t expect to get into any trouble for it. And his cronies are helping him for the same reason.
One funny tidbit about these hideous little tokens is that they are not, in fact, gold coins.
Despite the initial concept, the revised version is merely gold-finished. Just like Trump’s hideous redecoration of the Oval Office and other aspects of the still-standing portions of the White House.
(To be fair, at the current value of gold, there would have been a rush to acquire these and then melt them down — however illegally — if they had been solid gold. Alas.)
Like the Reflecting Pool’s Greenwater scandal, this appears to be heavy-handed symbolism about Trump and his deleterious impact upon the United States in every way, shape, and form.
It’s likely that no one can stop him from printing all of the ugly gold-finished coins that he wants. Perhaps, as with the meme coin that he has pumped and dumped to ten-figure profits, his sycophants and stans will rush to collect them.
