Trump Has a New Fundraising Grift

Donald Trump has cooked up another get-rich-quick scheme, and this time it’s at more than a  210 percent markup.

The Republican presidential nominee’s latest grift centers on selling silver coins, smartly promoted as “Trump Coins,” that feature images of the White House, Trump’s signature, and of course, Trump’s face.

The one troy ounce medallions, which went on sale Wednesday morning, are marked at $100 a pop before shipping—more than three times the price of a spot of silver at the time of publication, according to APMEX.

The website, RealTrumpCoins.com, lists an “investment disclaimer” on the tokens, warning that they’re intended as “collectible items for individual enjoyment only, and not for investment purposes.” 

“The coins are not political and have nothing to do with any political campaign,” the website reads, despite the fact that the website’s biography on X describes the company as an “official partner of the Trump Organization.”

The project is just the latest in a long series of Trumpian hustles this year, which have so far included launching a remarkably ugly sneaker and selling NFT trading cards of himself dressed in superhero costumes and astronaut suits. He also made some quick cash on a limited-edition, $60 God Bless the USA Bible co-promoted by “God Bless the USA” singer Lee Greenwood; took the parent company of his social media platform Truth Social public; and stamped his name on a new cryptocurrency platform headed by his two sons, Eric and Don Jr., which even Trump’s allies have criticized as a “huge mistake.”

The former leader of Project 2025 once claimed that many of Donald Trump’s policies for his second term would be ripped right from the pages of their authoritarian playbook.

In a recently unearthed video, Paul Dans, the former director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, spoke about the similarities between his policy plan and Trump’s on Steve Bannon’s War Room.

Dans said that his organization, which includes 140 former Trump staffers, wasn’t technically affiliated with their former boss’s campaign—but that it didn’t particularly matter because their product was 100 percent Trump.

“We’re not, to be sure, connected to President Trump’s campaign. But many of our ideas, you’ll see one-to-one mirroring,” Dans admitted.

“We sat down and wrote this book before President Trump had even announced,” Dans added.

It seems that Trump’s staffers knew him best while crafting their project’s agenda, which includes everything from the dissolution of essential government agencies, such as the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency, to the implementation of federal abortion bans and contraception restrictions.

Dans previously appeared on War Room in June and called Project 2025 an “instruction manual” for a second Trump administration.

Dans resigned as director of the project in July, when Trump repeatedly tried to disavow the conservative manifesto after it started to be covered more widely in the press. But Dans’s resignation failed to quell the concerns of Democrats, and none of Trump’s attempts to distance himself, like pretending not to know what Project 2025 even was, have been particularly convincing.

Representative Nancy Pelosi scolded CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview Tuesday for giving airtime to Donald Trump’s attack on Kamala Harris’s mental fitness.

Tapper brought up the subject by mentioning criticism of how the media has covered Trump’s apparent cognitive decline.

“I’m sure that you hear from progressive voters, Democratic voters who say—as I hear from them on social media—[that] the media made such a big deal out of Joe Biden’s alleged cognitive problems; why don’t they talk about Donald Trump’s cognitive problems?” Tapper said to Pelosi. “Well, Donald Trump talked about that just a second ago, and I want to get your reaction.”

Tapper played a clip of Trump at a rally claiming that Kamala Harris has “got bigger cognitive problems than [Biden] has, in my opinion.”

“Why would you even cover that?” replied Pelosi, clearly annoyed. “This is a person who is not on the level. He is their nominee for president. He is incompetent. Let’s not even talk about the silliness of it all, and the weirdness of it all, and the assault on women that it is.”

Tapper was criticized earlier this week for echoing a false claim that Representative Rashida Tlaib made antisemitic comments against Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. In reality, Tlaib was questioning why the attorney general’s office was filing criminal charges against pro-Palestine protesters but hadn’t done so in other protest cases. Tapper’s response fell short of a full apology in that case.

During the first presidential debate between Trump and President Biden in June, Tapper was criticized along with debate co-moderator Dana Bash for failing to challenge any of Trump’s false statements. Trump, who had attacked the network in the days leading up to the debate, was singing Tapper and Bash’s praises afterward. All of this adds to a long list of criticism of how Tapper and CNN handle political coverage.

Donald Trump’s campaign said the former president was briefed by top U.S. intelligence officials about more attempted assassination attempts against him, this time coordinated by one of the largest powers in the Middle East: Iran.

The Republican presidential nominee took to X overnight Tuesday to put the alleged intelligence on blast, claiming that the entire U.S. military is in on the mission to protect him.

“Big threats on my life by Iran,” Trump posted. “The entire U.S. Military is watching and waiting. Moves were already made by Iran that didn’t work out, but they will try again. Not a good situation for anyone. I am surrounded by more men, guns, and weapons than I have ever seen before.

“Thank you to Congress for unanimously approving far more money to Secret Service—Zero ‘NO’ Votes, strictly bipartisan,” he continued. “Nice to see Republicans and Democrats get together on something. An attack on a former President is a Death Wish for the attacker!”

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed that they had briefed Trump’s campaign, but declined to offer additional details, reported NBC News.

Trump has survived two assassination attempts in recent months, both of which were conducted by U.S. citizens on domestic soil. Thomas Matthew Crooks, who shot at Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13, was a registered Republican. Ryan Wesley Routh, who attempted to shoot Trump at one of his golf courses on Sunday, voted for Trump in 2016 and supported a Nikki Haley–Vivek Ramaswamy Republican ticket.

“President Trump was briefed earlier today by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence regarding real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate him in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement. “Intelligence officials have identified that these continued and coordinated attacks have heightened in the past few months, and law enforcement officials across all agencies are working to ensure President Trump is protected and the election is free from interference.”

Donald Trump’s pledge to be women’s “protector” is not sitting so well with, well, women. That includes his own former White House employees.

During an appearance Tuesday night on CNN, former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farrah Griffin was asked if she thought there was anything odd about Trump’s rant about women from his campaign event in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the night before.

“I started laughing and thinking it was creepy, but then thinking more about it, it’s very infantilizing,” Griffin said.

“Talking about women as though we’re weak, we’re meek, we need a protector, we need a defender, and we just sit around thinking about abortions all day,” Griffin continued. “It just underscores a fundamental lack of understanding for why a demographic that represents half of the country is one that he is struggling so profoundly with.

“I think Donald Trump, if he loses this election, is going to look back and think that one of the worst decisions he made was not having a female on the ticket, who actually knows how to speak to living, breathing, normal women about issues that matter to them,” Griffin said.

Griffin added that in addition to reproductive rights, economics and national security were also womens’ issues. “The way he is talking about them is not the way to sway voters in the middle,” Griffin said.

A recent NBC News poll found that Kamala Harris was leading Trump among women voters by 21 points.

Trump’s not the only one struggling to connect with women voters. Last week, Bernie Moreno, a Trump-endorsed candidate for Senate from Ohio, told the audience at a town hall that he thought it was “crazy” that women only cared about abortion.