Trump Declares War on the Penny, But the Nickel Strikes Back

Somewhere in the haze of Super Bowl Sunday, as America was drowning in beer foam and overpriced chicken wings, Donald J. Trump—47th President of the United States, Reality TV King, and perpetual connoisseur of half-baked economic stunts—decided it was time to kill the penny.

“Let’s rip the waste out of our great nation’s budget, even if it’s a penny at a time,” Trump bellowed from the void that is Truth Social, no doubt with the triumphant glee of a man who just realized he can sign executive orders between commercial breaks.

And just like that, the humble 1-cent coin, long banished to the dark corners of America’s glove compartments and junk drawers, was sentenced to death. The rationale? It costs more to produce than it’s worth, and we are a nation of hard-nosed capitalists, not sentimental hoarders of useless metal.

On the surface, it makes sense. The penny has been a fiscal parasite for years, costing the U.S. Mint nearly four cents per coin. It is the currency equivalent of a dying mall Santa: outdated, unwanted, and vaguely depressing. But as with most things in Trump’s orbit, reality is never quite as tidy as the announcement.

Because in a twist so rich with irony it could buy you a bottle of bottom-shelf whiskey, eliminating the penny won’t actually save money. No, no, dear reader—this is where the nickel shuffles onto the stage, cigar in mouth, flipping the bird to logic and reason.

The Great Nickel Disaster

The penny’s demise creates a void in our lowest-value transactions, and guess who gets called in for backup? That’s right—the nickel, which, in a masterpiece of government inefficiency, costs nearly 14 cents to produce.

Yes, you read that right. The government loses more money making nickels than it ever did on pennies, but now, thanks to Trump’s latest economic stroke of genius, we might need to mint millions more of them.

It’s like solving your leaky faucet problem by dynamiting the entire plumbing system.

The Treasury Department, no stranger to burning taxpayer money in creative ways, had actually been scaling back nickel production to cut its losses. Now, thanks to the sudden penny vacuum, estimates suggest we may need to crank out billions more nickels just to keep up with cash transactions. That means an even bigger drain on resources, an even larger government subsidy for Big Nickel (yes, that’s a thing), and the kind of bureaucratic comedy that makes you wonder if the people in charge are all huffing industrial glue.

A Nation Drowning in Useless Metal

To fully grasp the absurdity, let’s take a historical detour. The U.S. ditched the half-penny in 1857 when it still had the buying power of today’s dime. Since then, inflation has eroded the penny into oblivion, but America—being the stubborn, nostalgia-drunk beast that it is—kept it around, largely because of lobbyists from the zinc industry (who provide the metal for pennies) and a strange national attachment to Abraham Lincoln’s forlorn little face.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands have all axed their lowest-value coins with minimal disruption. Cash transactions were rounded up or down, and the global economy did not collapse. But here in the land of the free, we treat every minor adjustment to the status quo like a direct assault on the Constitution.

Pennies were already more of a nuisance than a currency. They are the cockroaches of American capitalism—ubiquitous, annoying, and completely worthless in any real-world scenario. But nickels? They’re not much better.

Nobody uses them. They linger in cashier trays, jam vending machines, and occasionally get mistaken for quarters, leading to intense, existential disappointment. If you handed a cashier a handful of nickels to pay for something over two dollars, they’d look at you like you just kicked their dog.

And yet, here we are, about to usher in a Nickel Renaissance that nobody asked for.

The Bigger Picture: Trump’s Fiscal Theater

The funniest part? This entire fiasco is a textbook Trumpian maneuver: a big, flashy, headline-grabbing move that looks like cost-cutting but ultimately creates a more expensive mess for someone else to clean up.

It’s government by reality TV script: Do something dramatic, take credit for “fixing” a problem, and conveniently ignore the chaos left in your wake.

Killing the penny is a fine idea—long overdue, even—but doing it without a plan for the nickel is like outlawing forks and then being shocked when people start eating spaghetti with their hands.

The real solution? Ditch both the penny and the nickel. Other countries have done it. The sky didn’t fall. Instead of making more nickels, we could just round cash transactions to the nearest dime. It would simplify transactions, reduce minting costs, and finally put an end to the national scourge of “take a penny, leave a penny” trays.

But that would require a level of strategic thinking that this administration—and, frankly, most of our elected officials—seem incapable of.

Instead, we’re stuck in this farcical loop, where Trump’s attempt to “cut government waste” is about to create a bigger, costlier problem. It’s the economic equivalent of putting out a candle by throwing a Molotov cocktail at it.

And so, as the penny fades into history, we brace for the next wave of absurdity: a bloated nickel supply, a Treasury Department scrambling to justify its newfound losses, and a nation still hopelessly clinging to a currency system that makes no damn sense.

So raise a glass (or better yet, a nickel) to Trump’s latest bright idea. Because if there’s one thing America does better than anyone, it’s turning simple solutions into expensive disasters.