How big you want your name on camera? You want this big, we can do it this big. Mick, get him a t-shirt. Thatll be $20 thank you.
"How big you want your name on camera? You want it this big? We can do it this big. Mick, get him a hat. That'll be $20, thank you." Mark Wilson / GETTY IMAGES

My fellow Americans, the President of the United States has monetized a speech he did not write to fund a campaign he probably does not want to win again. Behold:


That's right. If you donate $1 to the President's campaign, your name will appear on the Trump campaign's livestream of the State of the Union address. It's sort of like giving $1 to Jerry's Kids at the supermarket and then seeing your name posted on a wall next to the bathrooms. But instead of donating to help the innocent victims of a degenerative muscular disease, you're donating to help a dummy win the presidency.

According to USA Today, Trump's asking price in the fundraising e-mail dropped from $35 down to $1 over the course of a single day.

I guess you could argue that Trump is desperate to convince everybody that a significant number of Americans support his efforts to draw his racist little curtain along the southern border, and so monetizing the presidency in this way is actually a smart—if ethically dubious—marketing decision for his bad idea. But new poll numbers released today from Gallup show that an increasing number of Americans oppose the wall, and they oppose it by a wide margin. He's not winning this PR battle, and he knows he's not winning it. And that's just how he likes it. So long as he never wins the wall, he'll be able to paint Democrats and the Congress as bullying obstructionists. In the meantime, he'll be content to skim money from his hapless constituency.