Despite his claims, Donald Trump’s business career has had many more failures than successes.
His record of catastrophic investments has never held Trump back, however, and now the one-term, twice-impeached, 91-time felony-charged former president has embarked on a new hustle: selling little cut-out pieces of a suit he wore during one of his arrests.
“It was a great suit, believe me, a really good suit. It’s all cut up, and you’re gonna get a piece of it,” Trump said in a video announcing the sale.
Trump wore a blue suit when he was arrested and had his mugshot taken at an Atlanta jail in August. The former Apprentice host has already monetized the mugshot: on his campaign website, people can buy coffee mugs, T-shirts and Christmas stockings bearing the image.
The move into fabric sales is a new one, however.
To buy a piece of the suit, people first have to buy 47 “digital trading cards”, each featuring an illustration of Trump, through the Collect Trump Cards website. Buyers will then receive a bit of the suit, or tie, that Trump wore when he was arrested – on charges related to his attempts to overturn the election – at Fulton county jail in August 2023.
The suit, according to the website description, is “the most historically significant artifact in United States history”.
The suit is described as “priceless”. People can buy a piece of it for $4,699.53.
Trump, a former TV host, touted his business career as a reason why he should be elected during the 2016 presidential campaign.
His efforts have included Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage and Trump Shuttle, a short-lived airline. All failed.
GoTrump, a travel site, didn’t last, nor did Trump Steaks. A Trump board game was discontinued after two years, a Trump magazine folded, and Trump University was forced to settle fraud lawsuits for $25m after being accused of “swindling thousands of Americans out of millions of dollars”.
Trump has also filed for corporate bankruptcy six times.
Indeed, in 2021, Forbes found that Trump, 77, would be far richer had he simply invested the inheritance he got from his father, who ran a successful, if problematic, real estate company.
It is the third series of cards Trump has sold. A batch of 45,000 cards sold out in December 2022 for a total of nearly $4.4m. Trump only netted between $100,000 and $1m from the sales, Forbes reported.
The cards include Trump sitting in the chair occupied by Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial, and an image of Trump wearing a white cowboy hat, superimposed over an illustration of some running horses.
Others show Trump as a kind of half robot, and there is one of him dressed as a Captain America-type character. One card shows Trump, who was medically exempted from the military during the Vietnam war due to a questionable diagnosis of bone spurs, dressed in army garb.
It is unclear how many pieces of the suit are available. In 2018 a medical exam, conducted by a doctor-turned-Republican congressman, Trump was 6ft 3in and weighs 239lb, although when Trump claimed to weigh 215lb when he was arrested in Georgia. The former president is known to favor billowy suits with shoulder pads, but the measurements of his chest, waist and inseam are not publicly available.
In any case, buyers seeking a piece of suit should beware. Business Insider found that the fine print on Collect Trump Cards includes a disclaimer that if delivery of the bit of suit “cannot be fulfilled due to an issue in the manufacturing, production, or delivery”, purchasers will have to settle for a “limited edition Trump NFT” instead.
