According to Jonathan O’Connell in The Washington Post, U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach and his senior adviser, Mike Brown, have been pressing the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to produce the quarter-G-note. After the printing bureau’s director, Patty Solimene, was rude enough to point out that it’s illegal to put the face of any living person on United States currency, she got reassigned against her will to another job at Treasury. You can see a mockup of the proposed Trump $250 greenback here.
There’s not much more to say about the lawlessness and pathology of Trump’s effort to paste his puss onto American currency, so I won’t. Instead, I invite you to consider another aspect that’s gone unremarked thus far: The denomination Trump is trying to create would be tailor-made for criminals.
Henry’s argument, and mine, is that practically the only constituency that really needs high-denomination currency is criminals, and yet the United States stubbornly persists in printing $100 bills. (Back in 1976, Henry also fretted about $50 bills, but 50 years of inflation have made those less alluring to the criminal class.) We actually print more Benjamins than any other denomination except the dollar bill: $1.3 billion of them in 2023, the most recent year for which data are available. That’s more than five times greater than the number of $20 bills printed that year. A decade ago, before America became a cashless society, we printed more twenties than Benjamins, probably because that’s what ATMs like to dispense. Gen-X hipsters used to refer to twenties as “yuppie food stamps.” But if you’re like me, you go to the ATM a lot less frequently than you once did.
Rogoff calculates that more than one-third of all U.S. paper currency is used by criminals and tax cheats. If we assumed that this criminal activity was spread proportionally among all denominations in circulation, then 10 percent of Benjamins would be used by criminals and tax cheats. But of course criminal activity isn’t spread proportionally among all denominations. It’s concentrated in the highest denomination, the hundred-dollar bill. It’s therefore reasonable to extrapolate that the proportion of Benjamins used by criminals and tax cheats well exceeds 50 percent.
If the Trump Treasury followed that formula, then a commemorative $250 greenback would sell for perhaps $750 and there would be pitifully few takers, even among criminals. But I seriously doubt the president will allow his precious Donald to become some obscure collector’s item. My guess is that in the end Trump will eschew surcharges, eschew numeric limits, and print a maximum number of Donalds, because the whole point is to spread his ugly mug far and wide. If I’m right, then criminals will have plenty of use for the Donald.
Might that prospect deter our president? Of course not. Trump is already getting rich off crypto, another favored vehicle for criminal activity, and he’s pardoning cybercriminals and other white collar scofflaws left and right. Trump is a convicted felon himself! Those banners featuring Trump’s scowling portrait that hang outside the Justice, Labor, and Agriculture departments? They’re inspired by, and for all I know are directly copied from, a mug shot taken when Trump got indicted three years ago for racketeering in Georgia. (Two years later, the prosecutor dismissed that case because “There is no realistic prospect that a sitting President will be compelled to appear in Georgia to stand trial.”) You can’t insult a person by saying he gives aid and comfort to criminals when that person compares himself to “the late, great” Al Capone. The convenience of a $250 bill for the criminal underworld isn’t a bug in Trump’s semiquincentennial celebration; it’s a feature. Happy birthday, America, Let’s try to do better in 2276.
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