The $1 Trump coin: legal tender, depending on what you mean by legal

Two hallmarks of Donald Trump’s second-term: the president’s enthusiasm for putting his name and face on things, and his cavalier approach to established law.

Today the president is once again combining both those interests, as the government releases a $1 coin bearing his image, an item of currency which scholars say should be illegal, but which is happening anyway. How many times have you heard that in the last 18 months?

The US has had a long tradition of not putting living people on US currencybeginning in the late 1700s when the US Mint, which manufactures and distributes currency, wanted to put an image of George Washington on US money. Washington declined, saying it would be too much like a monarchy putting its rulers on money. In 1866, Congress passed an amendment barring the “portrait or likeness” of living people from appearing on currency.

That doesn’t appear to have bothered Trump. His scowling face dominates the new $1 coin, which is legal tender, and looks gold but is actually made from zinc, manganese, nickel and copper. It costs $61 to buy 25 one-dollar coins – you do the math – and about 9m of the coins are being made. They will, according to the US Mint, “honor 250 years of great American heritage”.

That all sounds great, if you’re into that sort of thing, but what about the law?.

Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, has argued that during the 150th celebration of America’s “birthday”, the face of then president Calvin Coolidge appeared on a coin, so during the 250th, the Trump coin is fine.

The main problem seems to be that there’s a hodge-podge of laws which govern what can and cannot go on a coin. The 1866 ban on featuring living people arose from an impressively creative act of vanity. An incoming five-cent note was supposed to feature an image of the deceased explorer William Clark, but a treasury official called Spencer M Clark took advantage of the pair sharing a last name to instead print his own face on the note.

The problem was that members of Congress a) noticed and b) were unamused. They passed an amendment which ruled that US money can only feature dead individuals – but it only applied to paper money.

“For me, I would consider it illegal,” Gabriel Mathy, an associate professor of economics at American University who has studied American currency, said of the Trump coin.

“But the United States has all these laws, which really are norms because they’re not really enforceable.”

The coin hasn’t been produced without a fight. In May, a group of Democratic members of Congress wrote to the treasury department in May, urging them to desist with the coin, pointing to a 2005 law which further restricted which presidents could appear on coins.

And in March, James Rickher, a retired attorney in Portland, filed a request to block the coin, arguing it was illegal, but in June a federal judge denied that motion, writing that Rickher had “failed to present evidence that clearly shows he will personally suffer concrete harm from issuance of the challenged coin”, Fox 12 reported. The judge noted, however, that his ruling did not determine whether the coin is illegal or legal.

And so today, Americans will be able to honor 250 years of great American heritage by buying a questionably legal one-dollar coin for roughly $2.44. If you’d like to know who came up with such a brilliant plan, just look at the coin.