A hat, along with two other items, will be auctioned off for a low, low starting bid of $250,000.
She allowed the bids to be made in cryptocurrencies. Remember this. This will be important.
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She referred to the auction as the "Head of State" collection. It included the custom-made, wide-brimmed white hat she wore to meet the French President and his wife, as well as a watercolor of Trump in the hat.
One year after leaving the White House, Mrs. Trump is remaking herself as a businesswoman. She is reviving her personal brand for monetary gain, but in a vast departure from previous first ladies, she licensed her name to jewelry and skin care lines.
The plan has an unexpected crash in the works.
A portion of the proceeds from this auction will provide foster care children with access to computer science and technology education, according to a small disclosure on the auction's website. The rest will go to Trump. The office of Trump did not respond to questions about how much of the proceeds will be donated.
The Washington Post checked the hat auction exactly two days before it ended. The starting bid had dropped to $155,916 by the time the clock ran 24 hours faster. At an earlier point in the 14-day auction, the bids had reached more than $275,000.
The auction only accepted bids in cryptocurrencies, which have plummeted in value in the last week.
When risk-taking intersects with bad timing, it can be a prime example of what happens in the crisis. One of the hardest-hit cryptocurrencies was Solana, which fell more than 40% over the previous week. On Friday and Saturday, the Solana database had an outage, which added to its free fall. Had this auction taken place in December of 2021, Trump would have accepted bids in Solana during a surge in its value, which had increased 11,150% since the beginning of the year.
Instead, in a strange turn of events, the auction ended early Tuesday morning, with the hat and its lot going for less than the asking price. After five hours, the site read "Auction Ended", and then the next time The Post checked, bidding had reopened. The time was 1:45 a.m. The highest bid is still 1,800 SOL, but with a value of $177,750, which is1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556
At a time when the Trump family is under intense scrutiny, this is all happening, including by New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat who has filed evidence in a civil investigation against former president Trump and his three oldest children.
McCarthy and Trump talked about their call.
Captions will look like this
Kevin McCarthy and Donald Trump expanded on what they said during their phone call after the Capitol attack.
Experts on modern first ladies are puzzled by the post-White House activities of the former first lady.
Most previous first ladies have used their celebrity to do good works, according to the author of The President's partner: The First Lady in the Twentieth Century.
It is bucking tradition to sell clothing worn by the first lady. First ladies usually donate historic items to their husband's libraries and museums as a way of preserving history for the public.
Pierre, the French-born, New York-based designer who became her White House stylist after making her inaugural gown, custom-made the hat for the occasion. Mrs. Trump decided to auction off the hat because she was aware of the important moment for the country.
Lauren Wright, a political scientist who studies first ladies, says she is not surprised by the controversy surrounding her.
Other first ladies and presidents have engaged in for-profit activities, but that doesn't take up as much time as their not-for-profit activities.
The first lady was always unconventional. She was relatively inactive in public and rarely spoke with the press. Even though polls showed her to be the most popular member of the Trump family, she refused to campaign for Republican candidates. She ended the administration as the least popular first lady ever, with a CNN/SSRS poll showing 42% of the population had a favorable opinion of her.
According to People and CNN, she spends most of her time at Mar-a-Lago with her sister, parents and son, and has a routine of lunch, dinner with her husband, facials, manicures and massages.
She seems to be reverting back to more of the life she had when she was living in New York. Gutin says that she was a consumer in New York and always had a penchant for fashion and cultural trends.
Trump appeared to be content to stay out of the public eye for most of the year. She began her account with her farewell speech from the White House and has videos of her meeting children, thanks for birthday wishes and holiday greetings. She came out swinging after a historian called Trump's renovation of the Rose Garden an "evisceration" on its one-year anniversary.
The picture of the Rose Garden in its infancy was shown to Trump by BeschlossDC. The most common critique of the renovation was that Trump took out the famous crabapple trees, which were said to be bad for sunlight reaching the roses. The barren look of many early photos of the renovations are because the flower bushes were newly planted and not close to full bloom.
It seems that Trump was always planning to return to branding opportunities. Trump filed lawsuits in the US and Britain against the Daily Mail for insinuating that she worked as an escort. According to the Associated Press, the cases were settled for nearly $3 million.
The filing claimed that the tabloid's insinuations cost Trump the chance to launch a broad-based commercial brand in multiple product categories.
The ethics of making money off the first lady's office are murky.
The second initiative Trump has undertaken in the past year is the hat auction. The first sale of an NFT featured a watercolor painting of her eyes, called "Melania's Vision", by French artist Marc-Antoine Coulon, who also pained the hat NFT. The NFT was worth around $185 at the time, but it was sold for unlimited quantities. Each came with an audio message from Trump.
There are other celebrities who are enamored with NFTs and cryptocurrencies. The value of the NFTs of their images dropped quickly after they were sold. Matt Damon has been featured in a commercial for a new type of coin, and Reese Witherspoon has also commented on the coin being the future.
The unique nature of NFTs, being digitally marked, authenticated and non-replicable, seems to appeal to Trump, who used the phrase "one-of-a-kind" many times in advertising the hat, watercolor and NFT.
You would think that she is an NFT spokeswoman if you look at her feed. Since December 16, when she launched Melania's Vision, she has sent out Christmas wishes and praise for the Coast Guard. The news release stated that Mrs. Trump would release NFTs in regular intervals.
She has a page on her website that answers questions such as "What is an NFT?", "How do I create a crypto wallet?", and "Why buy an NFT?"
The page dedicated to her former White House initiative, Be Best, has two paragraphs and a video. Trump wants to continue Be Best, which focused on children's issues such as drug abuse and mental health. On Monday, Trump announced that she was being honored at a gala for her Be Best initiative Fostering the Future, which provides foster care children with access to education in computer science.
Her website did not include any information about the Fostering the Future initiative.
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