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Melania Trump's auction of a hat she once wore at the White House isn't quite going as planned.
In early January, the former first lady announced she would be auctioning the wide-brimmed white hat she wore during a 2018 visit by President Emmanuel Macron of France.
The auction was expected to open with a minimum bid of $250,000. However, as of Tuesday evening, only a few bids had been made, with the dollar value of the highest one hovering around $170,000, according to the New York Times.
The auction is set to close early Wednesday morning.
The NYT reported that the auction appears to have fallen victim to a crash in the cryptocurrency market.
The hat is being auctioned as part of the former first lady's "Head of State Collection, 2022," which also includes a watercolor of her wearing it, as well as a virtual piece of art called a nonfungible token (NFT).
Bids were only accepted in the cryptocurrency of the Solana blockchain called SOL, which was trading at $170 per token when the auction was announced.
"But in the weeks since, SOL, along with most other cryptocurrencies, has suffered major declines in value. On the evening before the closing of the auction on Tuesday, each SOL was worth about $95," the NYT reported. "Mrs. Trump could hold on to the Solana tokens and hope that their value increases. Or the dip in value might continue, leaving her with an even smaller take."
The former first lady has said a portion of the proceeds will benefit children in foster care. But she has not said what percentage she plans to keep.
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Former supporter accuses ‘dirtbag’ Trump of stealing ‘Keep America Great’ slogan
January 25, 2022
Former president Donald Trump is accused of stealing his "Keep America Great" 2020 re-election slogan from a retired entrepreneur who submitted it to his campaign website.
Jeff Paul, then a Trump supporter, says he sent the proposed slogan to the campaign one week before Trump took office in 2017.
Paul received an automated response saying the campaign would be in touch with him. A few days later, Trump announced in an interview with the Washington Post that "Keep America Great" would be his 2020 re-election slogan.
“I thought, ‘You dirty bastard,'" Paul told the Daily Beast for a story published Tuesday.
"And with that thought, Paul kicked off a crusade to claim the rights to what would eventually become Trump’s on-again, off-again, quasi-official 2020 campaign slogan," the Daily Beast reports. "The dispute, which dragged on in one form or another for more than four years, has all the trademarks of a Trump legal war. For decades, the real estate tycoon has zealously deployed an army of lawyers—some of them ethically challenged—to bully courtroom opponents into submission with some combination of threats, stonewalling, countersuits, and other dilatory tactics, outspending them until they’re bled dry. And here, like so many of Trump’s relationships with former allies, the little guy invariably gets burned."
Paul, who says he now considers Trump a "dirtbag," eventually sued the former president's campaign in trademark court.
"But we’ll never know what a judge would say," the Daily Beast reports. "That’s because over the next year, Trump’s legal team—true to form—filed extension after extension, kicking the case down the road until just a few weeks before Election Day, when the campaign was all but over. ... Then, last spring, Paul conceded defeat. He withdrew his case on May 4 and—nearly $100,000 in the hole—called it a day."
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'Unbelievable': White House reporter smacks down Eric Trump's claim his father worked '24 hours a day'
January 25, 2022
On Fox News Tuesday, Eric Trump took a shot at the Biden administration, claiming that the president and his officials are lazy compared to those in his father's White House.
"These people are not present," he said. "The difference between them and my father, my father sat there 24 hours a day."
Eric Trump: These people are not present\u2026 The difference between them and my father, my father sat there 24 hours a day\u2026pic.twitter.com/w9GVPJ17Gk— Acyn (@Acyn) 1643156343
The comments caught the eye of Huffington Post correspondent S.V. Dáte, who quickly called it out as a lie — and pointed out that Donald Trump spent very little time doing work compared to any other chief executive in modern times.
Unbelievable.\n\nDonald Trump kept the lightest work* schedule of any president going back at least to Reagan, possibly to Eisenhower.\n\nHe rarely got to the West Wing before noon. \n\n(*Unless watching TV and tweeting about he just saw is defined as "work.")https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1486131535266807809\u00a0\u2026— S.V. D\u00e1te (@S.V. D\u00e1te) 1643159697
When Trump was in the White House, he was infamous for spending large chunks of the day blacked out for "executive time" where he would do little except relax, watch TV and sometimes rant on social media. Trump also spent a considerably fraction of his presidency away from the White House at his Mar-a-Lago country club, which his aides euphemistically referred to as the "Winter White House," and lives there in his post-presidency.
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