It Looks Like a Trump $1 Coin is On the Way

During an interview with Fox News’ Jesse Waters, Bessent showed off a new design for a US $1 coin, stating “the president’s also gonna have a coin with his image on it.”

The circulating design Bessent showed traces back to candidate designs the White House released in December 2025, though it doesn’t appear to have received final sign-off from the Commission of Fine Arts yet.

There are multiple laws that obstruct living people from appearing on US currency, let alone sitting presidents. These go as far back as 1866 and as recently upheld as 2005. But if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that bending laws can be fun and profitable.

Bessent has argued that different rules apply to commemorative coins than to paper money, telling Watters his only two mandates as Treasury Secretary are that currency includes “In God We Trust” and excludes images of living people, a standard he says applies to bills but not coins. He pointed to a Calvin Coolidge coin issued for the nation’s 150th anniversary as precedent for putting a sitting or recently sitting president on a commemorative piece.

The Treasury is reportedly leaning on the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020, signed during Trump’s first term, which gives the Treasury Secretary latitude to issue special $1 coins themed around the 250th anniversary.

Legal scholars and congressional Democrats have pushed back hard, and some reporting suggests that same 2020 law includes language barring a living person’s portrait on the reverse of specified coins, which would cut against the administration’s own justification. Nothing about this has been resolved in court, and a legal challenge before these coins hit circulation would not be surprising.

Presidential coins are usually about looking backward. The $1 Coin Act’s whole premise was that history, not politics, decides who gets minted.

A sitting president pushing his own face onto pocket change, paired with his signature on the $100 bill, is a break from that norm that numismatists and political observers alike are going to keep talking about regardless of how the legal questions shake out. If these coins do make it out of the Mint, presidential and commemorative coins have a track record of moving on the secondary market, especially early low-mintage runs.

America’s semiquincentennial has been a historic year for coin collectors and resellers. We’ve been tracking numerous releases over the past six months, with the recent July 4th privy marked quarters generating thousands of dollars for resellers.

Without knowing any production numbers or distribution strategies we can’t make any concrete predictions on what these will be worth on eBay. That assumes they even survive the legal challenges already being levied against them.

That said, Trump collectibles follow a pretty predictable pattern. The latest gear is revealed, hyped up, and then put up for sale (and usually produced in massive numbers). A small number of !!! Trump’s friends and family clever investors make millions and his supporters take home some cheap plastic shit. Resellers that know how to leverage the opportunity have scored hundreds, or even thousands of dollars from the right merch. The lesson? Don’t bet against the house.