Trump change, as in chump, comes to coin collecting

The North Korea middle finger salute is a send-up of the Trump-Kim summit. THE DEEPEST STATE
The North Korea middle finger salute is a send-up of the Trump-Kim summit. THE DEEPEST STATE

By BILLY JOE JESSUP

Coin collecting was cool when I was a kid back in the ’60s.

My parents would go to the bank and get me silver dollars and Kennedy half dollars.

This picture of a Kennedy half dollar isn’t mine. It’s one a rare coin dealer posted on Instagram in February.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BfLtspqAFug/?tagged=kennedyhalfdollar

My parents paid face value for the coins they gave me and I have kept them in little blue binders for decades. I’ve never been tempted to sell them to a numismatic-fevered dealer because I would feel the wrath of my late father.

Coin collecting is no longer fun now that Donald Trump is involved. I’m no fan of the president, so I’m certainly no fan of the Trump coins in circulation. The ones with his likeness are chump change to me.

This one is from December 2016, the month after Trump beat Hillary Clinton.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BOa4XeTDRAm/?taken-by=donaldtrumpcoins

What a joke. Even more ridiculous is the Trump-Kim peace summit coin available from the White House gift shop. You can’t commemorate the June 12 event that was called off last week, although a series of Trump tweets since then suggest the summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will take place as scheduled in Singapore.

Images of the coin appear on Twitter, and one of the first I saw was in Jim Acosta’s post on May 21. Acosta is CNN’s chief White House correspondent.

You would have to pay me to take the coin, but I do like the free parodies I’m seeing.

https://twitter.com/Basta_Masta/status/999990414588424193

https://twitter.com/AdamBlickstein/status/999652149297545216

Let’s make coin collecting fun again. More parodies, please.

 

 

Written by Billy Joe Jessup

Billy Joe Jessup, 66, is a Mississippi good old boy who saw himself as the Southern Richard Meltzer back in 1974 and 1975. Jessup wrote two satiric sports articles for the rock music magazine Zoo World when he was in his early 20s, but ZW rejected his third article, killing his confidence so much that he battled writer's block for more than four decades until his Guy Hut breakthrough in March 2018.