Did y’all know Donald Trump likes gold? Like, really likes it. “I’m gonna put this shit on every single thing in my home”-level likes it. It’s kind of his thing! Now, Trump has managed to spray his favorite material all over yet another presidential tradition, with The Washington Post reporting on the new design for Trump’s personal presidential challenge coin.
Challenge coins are a long-standing tradition in the military, where they’re sort of like informal medals that can also be used to make someone buy you a drink. They caught on in presidential fashions with Bill Clinton, who—after receiving a bunch of them from supporters on the campaign trail—eventually issued one of his own as commander-in-chief. (They’re usually given to military personnel, and secretly slipped via a seemingly innocuous presidential handshake.) According to pictures put up by the Post, the coins are generally a pretty subtle affair; a little blue, some understated brass, and, sometimes, the name of the issuing president.
Anyway, here’s Trump’s:
Honestly, how the fuck do you even parody that? It’s barely even a coin. It’s bright gold. It has “Make America Great Again,” on it once, and Trump’s name on it twice. It has a free-standing base. If you tried to secretly pass it to someone, the reflections would bounce off the jutting-out bits and blind passing aircraft. It is, in a way, perfectly Trumpian. Congratulations, Donald: You’ve made yet another part of the American political tradition very much your own.