Just over a minute into the new kind of performance art that Donald Trump invented — signing papers in front of a live audience — someone in the crowd at Capital One Arena yelled, “Sir, can I have a pen?”
It was not just any old pen that the newly inaugurated president later tossed into the crowd, but a Sharpie, Trump’s signing instrument of choice.
“His presidency is a master class in permanent ink,” said Palki Sharma in a segment on the show Vantage on FirstPost.
The Midas touch turns things to gold; the Trump touch does that as well, even though an association with Trump can also be risky. Prior to Trump’s reelection, for example, even generic red ball caps were an anathema to Trump haters.
It’s unlikely, however, that Sharpies will suffer the same fate. They’re too much a part of the culture, having achieved the status of Band-Aids and other brands so popular that their names are used even when people are talking about generics. They are a perennial feature of back-to-school shopping lists, a popular life hack and a way for Starbucks baristas to build brand loyalty.
And Sharpies are definitely having a moment — a long moment, dating to Sharpiegate in 2019 when a presidential tweet devolved into a brouhaha about whether Hurricane Dorian would affect Alabama.
That same year, Trump signed his name on part of a newly constructed border wall with a Sharpie.
Of course, pens used by presidents have always been small things of great significance. Barack Obama, for example, used 22 different pens to sign the Affordable Care Act into law and then distributed them as souvenirs. Lyndon Johnson used more than 70 to sign the Civil Rights Act.
But Trump has taken bill signing to a whole new level — while using a marker that has given many a parent a headache.
Even before he became president, Trump liked to use Sharpies “to sign autographs, write notes and mark up printed news articles before sending them back to their authors,” Michael Crowley wrote for The New York Times in 2019. Once in the White House, Trump disdained government-issued pens and reverted back to the Sharpie, even having the company make special ones for him.
“I was signing documents with a very expensive pen, and it didn’t write well,” Trump said in an HBO and Axios documentary. “It was a horrible pen, and it was extremely expensive. And then I started using just a Sharpie, and I said to myself, ‘Well wait a minute, this writes much better and this cost almost nothing.’”
Well, it might have cost him almost nothing.
Black Sharpies with the Trump signature on them are being offered on eBay for up to $1,850, even without evidence that the pens were actually used by Trump.
And, of course, the web address GetTrumpPens.com says “Launching Soon.”