Trump’s $250 Greenback Is a Gift to the Criminal Class

This is the other reason not to let Trump slap his mug on U.S. currency.

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........

© New Republic