Despite initial ridicule for his 2022 NFT launch, which featured absurd portrayals of himself, Donald Trump experienced sales success raising $4.4 million. This incident showed his ability to overcome public backlash. Following his presidential return, the White House has adopted similar strategies on their X account, emphasizing provocative images and content to maintain attention and showcase a playful yet combative online presence. Their posts blend celebratory and antagonistic tones, drawing in various social media characters and showing a unique digital strategy to engage the public.
When then-former president Donald Trump introduced a line of NFTs in December 2022, he was widely mocked for it. The digital trading cards alternately depicted Trump as a muscle-bound superhero, a cowboy, and an astronaut-like some antiquated fever dream of inspirational masculinity.
All the ridicule around Trump's stratospheric self-image, however, turned out to be a blip. Crucially, the NFTs sold out in less than 24 hours, raising an estimated $4.4 million, and like seemingly every obstacle in Trump's charmed political career, he incurred no lasting damage from the episode.
Now that Trump has resumed his presidency, his White House has apparently internalized this lesson. Its official X account now regularly blasts out similarly cringy portraiture, culminating over the weekend in AI-assisted images of Trump as the next pope and a shredded Sith Lord from Star Wars.
Ever since the inauguration in January, the White House's X account has served up a cosmic gumbo of horn-tooting and antagonistic trolling. Reflecting the president's relentless command of the attention economy, it often retweets various characters from the Trump Cinematic Universe.
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