Recently, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stood at the White House briefing room and held up a $250 bill with Donald Trump’s face on it. It is currently illegal to put a living person on US currency. They designed it anyway.
This is the most honest thing the Trump administration has ever produced.
The Monopoly man has always been a rich guy who plays with money that doesn’t mean anything to him. Trump’s face on a $250 bill is the same image, made official. A man in a suit, on novelty currency, presiding over an economy where $250 doesn’t buy a family’s weekly groceries.
Consider the denominations already in circulation. Benjamin Franklin on the hundred — diplomat, inventor, founding father. Abraham Lincoln on the five — saved the Union, ended slavery. Now Donald Trump on the two-fifty — the man whose Atlantic City casino empire filed for bankruptcy three times, in 2004, 2009, and 2014. More bankruptcies than any other major business in America. While his companies collapsed, he collected millions in salary and bonuses. The burden fell on investors and workers.
He took the casino — the one business designed to be impossible to lose money in — and bankrupted it. Multiple times. Then had it demolished with three thousand sticks of dynamite. That face is going on your money.
Meanwhile the administration that designed this bill also gutted Medicaid for millions of Americans, passed tax cuts for billionaires, and is watching egg prices eat what’s left of working family budgets. The $250 bill is not legal tender yet. But the people it will be handed to already know what Trump’s financial judgment is worth.
Monopoly money is fine for the board game. The problem is we’re all living in it.