Originally published at: Sure looks like Melania Trump bought her own NFT | Boing Boing
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No Fucking Trumps!
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Grifters gonna grift.
I really thought she was going to divorce the chump after they left the White House. Now I’m thinking that it went more like that scene in Succession where Marcia and her lawyer shake down Logan in exchange for her staying on as the wife. Judging by this, Biff probably threw in a promise to teach her The Art of the Deal Steal.
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Maybe she had second thoughts about selling it. This one time, I made a homemade White Elephant holiday gift that was so bad that nobody else wanted it, so I traded it back to myself to spare the mutual embarrassment of someone else being stuck with it.
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Yeah, but I wouldn’t expect TFG’s wife to care about someone else’s feelings.
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This is actually normal in the world of “auctions”.
She ended up with it because she put in a shill bid to bump up the price or make it look like someone else was interested.
Either no one else bid on it or she bid higher than anyone else was willing to so she ended up with it.
I see this ALL THE TIME in classic car auctions where I know the people and items involved. Everyone knows it goes on and no one seems to care. It is also a Social Event and there is a different Social Contract in play for these types of things. It’s all part of the game and if you call someone out on it or complain then YOU are the problem!
This one is interesting only because it was so easy to trace the bid. Normally that is really difficult in a live auction as you have people on phones with auction reps handling them so you don’t know who is bidding and sometimes you never know who ended up with the item.
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I am TOTALLY stealing this name for a new set of NFT’s!!! Kthnxbai 
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That would end up costing the shill quite a bit, no? They can’t reneg on the bid just because “they already own it”-- or can they? If not, they’re paying the auction house 10-25% “tax” on their belonging(!)
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Yeah, though now I suspect she stayed with him because only now is Trump actually making any money. She realized he was basically broke, but he’s been fairly effectively monetizing his political position and may end up worth something. Either that, or she simply resigned herself to living with (though more likely apart from) a man she obviously hates a while ago and sees no reason to change things. (Though maybe she’s also waiting for him to go to jail…)
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That’s correct but it is the price you sometimes pay for playing the game. These are all gamblers. If you lose money on a bet you don’t get a refund.
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Exactly. It’s part of the thrill for these people, with better odds of a payoff than Vegas table games.
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she could have saved a lot of time and not offered the item up – but then what kind of press would she get for that?
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I thought about that, but could there be another issue of straight money-laundering? I mean, it could also look like the organization that put on the auction basically just handed the individual Melania Trump $170k of cash from their own coffers, yes?
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Yes, absolutely possible. But in my opinion having been around people like this in other auction settings, it is also likely this was done to publicly demonstrate that this has “value” and in turn it means “Melania Trump has Value”.
I’ve known people that have bid up their own items at auction JUST to make sure that there is now a “public record” of the value. Yes it cost them the auction fee but in turn their appraiser can now use it to inflate the value of all the other items that person has. People that do that usually have a collection of similar things. There are some people that have a surprising amount of influence in certain markets and bidding up the right item(s) can lift an entire market up.
Even if she bought this back herself, she can still claim that “her things, including NFTs” have “enormous value” so hopefully someone else will REALLY “buy” the next one.
I’m reading a lot into this though and it could just be simply that she needed the cash from some “other” source that was not traceable. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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I think she may be waiting for her son to turn 18 so there’s no custody battle. ‘Melanie’ almost certainly has a pile of money stashed far away from the rest of the grift so she, her son and her parents can live well and still have adequate funds to sue dRumpf’s ass over a several year legal battle.
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Seems unlikely given that Trump has always had zero interest in his children (nor does he, most of the time, apparently know Baron even exists), but I suppose he’d likely wage a custody battle just to be an asshole…
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He didn’t go in for a custody battle for Don Jr., but at one point, during the Ivana divorce, basically kidnapped him. He may have sent a bodyguard to collect him. Ivana called his bluff, said fine, you raise him for a bit. TFG quickly gave him back. That’s from memory, I can’t find the link detailing the story, as there’s too many links about Trump kidnapping children (of the undocumented)
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I have long assumed that even if she initially signed up as the official T**** consort with no motive other than a green card and access to the gold toilets, she long ago decided to go all in on the T**** misogyny, lies, and birtherism. She’s just as big a grifter as he is. It’s a “love” match.
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