Imagine if Donald Trump had released this as his “major announcement” rather than his NFT trading cards. Or at least before his attempt to fundraise off of MAGA on social media. This might not qualify as a “major announcement,” but at least it would have been taken much more seriously.

Instead, the Trump campaign didn’t even “announce” this. They gave it as an exclusive to Jack Posobiec a couple of hours after Trump’s NFT launch on Truth Social. The strategic fumble is unfortunate, as this actually addresses real issues in play rather than just Trump’s compulsion for self-promotion:

EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: I have obtained a copy of President Trump unveiling the major planks of his official Free Speech Policy Proposal

This is the first video drop in a series to come from his 2024 presidential campaign pic.twitter.com/PDMUBNmc8W

— New Slippers Poso🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) December 15, 2022

Going after “the left-wing censorship regime” and restoring “the right to free speech for all Americans” is both worthy and topical to boot. The Trump campaign hasn’t released the transcript of this speech nor do they have the policy listed on the campaign website. In fact, the official Trump 2024 website is entirely dedicated to collecting e-mail addresses, cell phone numbers, and money. There are no links to an issue page yet, and in fact you can’t access anything on it without first entering an email address. Even this video isn’t accessible on the website yet.

So what does Trump pledge to do if elected to office again? The first order of his presidency will be to forbid federal agencies from interfering on speech platforms, and afterward will eliminate “misinformation” policing by the government. Trump also pledges to fire anyone involved in previous efforts to censor speech and contain dissent, a task which will be easier said than done under civil-service rules. (Trump has also earlier planned to revamp Schedule F to strip about 50,000 federal employees of civil-service protection by making them presidential appointees, but that’s also a fairly complicated task and will take years to work out.)

Calling this policy declaration a “major announcement” would have been a big stretch. Still, this is at least a policy stance on a vital current issue, not a series of comic drawings turning Trump into a superhero. Clearly from the video and its “superhero” imagery, Trump and his campaign chose to promote the “digital trading cards” as their “major announcement” today, putting the sale of these NFTs above policy and issues that matter.

And even that looks amateurish and dodgy. The website design for CollectTrumpCards.com looks like something out of 2002 rather than 2022, with center-justified text of varying fonts, lots of underlines, and bad sales pitches such as:

Each Digital Trading Card (NFT) is not only a rare collectible, it automatically enters YOU INTO A SWEEPSTAKES for a chance to win 1000’s of incredible prizes and meet the one and only #45! There’s no purchase necessary to enter!

The kicker to this is that the money isn’t going to elect Donald Trump, or anyone else. If you scroll aaalllllll the way to the bottom and expand the last question in the FAQ, this is what you learn:

So the “major announcement” from Trump and the campaign doesn’t actually have any connection to the campaign itself. It’s not even a fundraiser, at least not for MAGA purposes. It’s a for-profit project by NFT INT LLC, which pays licensing fees to CIC Digital LLC, which was conveniently created in March of this year. Given that the image and likeness is of Trump himself, and that Trump keeps a very tight grip on his branding, it’s very likely that CIC Digital LLC is a vehicle for Trump to earn money rather than fundraise on behalf of the MAGA agenda.

If nothing else, at least we got a very “major” look at the priorities of Trump and his team.