Through some combination of malignant narcissism, incipient dementia, and raging dyscalculia, President Donald Trump struggles to distinguish his 80th birthday, which is 17 days away, from the nation’s 250th birthday, which is 37 days away. The latest manifestation is Trump’s determination to commemorate the semiquincentennial by issuing a $250 commemorative bill decorated with an engraving of himself.
According to Jonathan O’Connell in The Washington Post, U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach and his senior adviser, Mike Brown, have been pressing the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to produce the quarter-G-note. After the printing bureau’s director, Patty Solimene, was rude enough to point out that it’s illegal to put the face of any living person on United States currency, she got reassigned against her will to another job at Treasury. You can see a mockup of the proposed Trump $250 greenback here.
The autocratic nature of a Trump denomination is difficult to ignore. It’s of a piece with Trump’s putting his face on banners hanging outside three Cabinet headquarters in Washington. A Trump greenback is also consistent with Trump’s putting his signature on the $100 bill, which is legal but unprecedented in this country and, as Reuters pointed out, mimics previous repressive autocratic foreign regimes like those of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, Idi Amin Dada in Uganda, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.
There’s not much more to say about the lawlessness and pathology of Trump’s effort to paste his puss onto American currency, so I won’t. Instead, I invite you to consider another aspect that’s gone unremarked thus far: The denomination Trump is trying to create would be tailor-made for criminals.
The practical undesirability of printing high-denomination bills is a longstanding hobby horse of mine. I’ve written about it for The New Republic (“Let’s Abolish the $100 Bill,” 2024) and for Slate (“Ban the Benjamins!,” 2010). I even yapped about it once on CBS Sunday Morning. My guru in this campaign is a self-described “investigative economist” and onetime Nader’s Raider whom I have never met named James S. Henry. I have, however, given careful study to the founding text Henry published half a century ago, while he was in graduate school, in The Washington Monthly (“Calling in the Big Bills,” 1976); to a follow-up Henry published in the Monthly (“How to Make the Mob Miserable,” 1980); and to a second follow-up Henry published in The National Interest (“Come On In, the Party’s Nearly Over,” 2016). We all stand on the shoulders of giants. In this matter, I stand on Henry’s. (I should acknowledge also a valuable 2024 report in Mother Jones by Oliver Bullough, and academic work by Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff and the British financier/philanthropist Peter Sands.)
Henry’s argument, and mine, is that practically the only constituency that really needs high-denomination currency is criminals, and yet the United States stubbornly persists in printing $100 bills. (Back in 1976, Henry also fretted about $50 bills, but 50 years of inflation have made those less alluring to the criminal class.) We actually print more Benjamins than any other denomination except the dollar bill: $1.3 billion of them in 2023, the most recent year for which data are available. That’s more than five times greater than the number of $20 bills printed that year. A decade ago, before America became a cashless society, we printed more twenties than Benjamins, probably because that’s what ATMs like to dispense. Gen-X hipsters used to refer to twenties as “yuppie food stamps.” But if you’re like me, you go to the ATM a lot less frequently than you once did.
When you look at the quantity of United States currency in circulation—greenbacks printed not in one year but in any year—the disturbing prevalence of high-denomination currency is even more dramatic. A larger chunk of the total greenbacks in circulation are Benjamins (19.9 billion) than any other denomination, including single-dollar bills (15.2 billion). Fully 35 percent of all bills in circulation are $100 bills, even though it’s unlikely that you, Dear Law-Abiding Reader, carry any in your wallet.
Rogoff calculates that more than one-third of all U.S. paper currency is used by criminals and tax cheats. If we assumed that this criminal activity was spread proportionally among all denominations in circulation, then 10 percent of Benjamins would be used by criminals and tax cheats. But of course criminal activity isn’t spread proportionally among all denominations. It’s concentrated in the highest denomination, the hundred-dollar bill. It’s therefore reasonable to extrapolate that the proportion of Benjamins used by criminals and tax cheats well exceeds 50 percent.
Now Trump wants to create a new $250 denomination that we’ll call (in loving memory of the late Ivana Trump) the Donald. If the Benjamin is a currency for criminals, simple arithmetic tells us the Donald is two and a half times more so. After the Post piece appeared the Treasury department said that its planning was of course contingent on congressional passage of a bill that Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina very fawningly introduced in February 2025. According to both the bill and the Treasury department, the Donald would be a “commemorative note.” But Wilson’s bill doesn’t stipulate how many of these notes the Treasury would print, and there’s no custom to follow because until now the federal government hasn’t issued commemorative greenbacks. It’s issued commemorative coins, adding to the face value a surcharge proportionate to the denomination, so that a commemorative half-dollar coin, for instance, might sell for $5.50, a commemorative $1 coin for $11, and a commemorative $5 coin for $40.
If the Trump Treasury followed that formula, then a commemorative $250 greenback would sell for perhaps $750 and there would be pitifully few takers, even among criminals. But I seriously doubt the president will allow his precious Donald to become some obscure collector’s item. My guess is that in the end Trump will eschew surcharges, eschew numeric limits, and print a maximum number of Donalds, because the whole point is to spread his ugly mug far and wide. If I’m right, then criminals will have plenty of use for the Donald.
Might that prospect deter our president? Of course not. Trump is already getting rich off crypto, another favored vehicle for criminal activity, and he’s pardoning cybercriminals and other white collar scofflaws left and right. Trump is a convicted felon himself! Those banners featuring Trump’s scowling portrait that hang outside the Justice, Labor, and Agriculture departments? They’re inspired by, and for all I know are directly copied from, a mug shot taken when Trump got indicted three years ago for racketeering in Georgia. (Two years later, the prosecutor dismissed that case because “There is no realistic prospect that a sitting President will be compelled to appear in Georgia to stand trial.”) You can’t insult a person by saying he gives aid and comfort to criminals when that person compares himself to “the late, great” Al Capone. The convenience of a $250 bill for the criminal underworld isn’t a bug in Trump’s semiquincentennial celebration; it’s a feature. Happy birthday, America, Let’s try to do better in 2276.