There’s no rest for the wicked, eh? While a lot of people have spent the past few weeks trying to do as little as possible, it has been go-go-go for the Trump family. Donald, Ivanka and Donald Jr have been issued with subpoenas as part of a fraud inquiry into the family’s businesses. Melania, meanwhile, has been busy building a business of her own. The former first lady, turned crypto queen, has jumped on the non-fungible token (NFT) trend: last month she was flogging a digital painting of her eyes titled Melania’s Vision (and promising an unspecified portion of the proceeds from her digital ventures would go to children ageing out of foster care). The price? One SOL (Solana, the cryptocurrency, is worth about £128). Now, she has released a picture of herself dressed in white for a starting bid of just 1,415.86 SOL (£180,000).
Melania’s NFT venture isn’t her first brush with entrepreneurship. She had a jewellery line and once developed a skincare range called Melania Trump’s Caviar Complexe C6™ with Lipid Matrix Receptor™ Technology. She tested her caviar creams on her then seven-year-old son Barron (“It smells very, very fresh … He likes it!” Melania told reporters at the time). Alas, no one else got a chance to use them due to a complicated lawsuit that killed the product before it got to the shops.
Will the NFT project fare better? I don’t know how many SOLs Melania has collected so far, but she has certainly generated a lot of WTFs. “This is not exactly using her platform for larger global or domestic impact,” one former White House official complained to CNN. “This is ostensibly a quick moneymaker.” Rubbish: it is obviously a quick moneymaker. But I don’t really care, do you? I reckon it is better for everyone if Melania spends her time flogging digital art and tweeting about bitcoin (which is how she spent her Monday). At least she isn’t trying to make a “global impact” via some charitable foundation that could be a veiled tax-avoidance scheme. The world has been affected enough by the Trumps, thank you very much.