When Donald Trump pulled the plug on minting new pennies — declaring the humble one-cent coin a relic of “government inefficiency” — many Americans shrugged. After all, a penny is hardly worth the metal that gives it form. It hides in our laundry, clinks uselessly in tip jars, and accumulates in mason jars atop refrigerators until we forget about the jar entirely. Even the old expression — “A penny for your thoughts” — sounds like an insult in a world where inflation has rendered thoughts a luxury.

So, when the administration said, “We’re eliminating the penny,” the country laughed politely and moved on. Comedy shows jumped on the news for one cycle. Pundits chattered about “common-sense reform.” And the president basked in headlines for saving a rounding error on the national ledger.

But the decision to kill America’s oldest coin — the last metallic echo of Lincoln’s face that millions interact with daily — is not a joke. It’s a signal. And if we don’t examine what’s being signaled, we’ll discover one day soon that something much larger than change has disappeared.

🎧 Listen to the narrated edition of: Penniless by Design: How Trump Eliminated Change to Keep America in Its Place (9 minutes, 36 seconds).

Trump did not eliminate the penny by accident. He did it because real change — economic, social, democratic — is precisely what he cannot afford the public to have.

Little Things Matter — Until They’re Gone

The penny has been with us since 1793. It predates the White House, the Louisiana Purchase, and the idea of California. It has survived depressions, recessions, and more than a few presidents who would have happily swapped Lincoln’s stern visage for their own.

It was also our most accessible denomination — a coin anyone could afford to leave or take. A child’s first ownership of money often began with a penny. A reminder that value, however small, still belonged to the holder.

So, when a leader declares that a small value is no longer worth preserving, what he is really saying is:

Small people are no longer worth considering.

Most people won’t complain. It feels trifling — like arguing over toothpicks during a house fire. But history tells us authoritarians love starting with symbols that make decent people feel silly for objecting. Pennies are perfect for that.

If you won’t defend the smallest unit of value in your society, you’re far less likely to protect the next thing that gets rounded away.

Rounding Errors and the Price of Dignity

Officially, the justification is mathematical: rounding to the nearest nickel saves time, money, and the annoyance of coin counting.

In practice, rounding favors the party with the power to round.

And that isn’t you.

When cash purchases are totaled at the register, prices are rounded in whatever direction best “streamlines” the transaction. And who uses cash more than any other group? The wealthy? Tech-savvy suburbanites tapping phones? Bitcoin bros?

No. Cash belongs to the poor. To workers. To migrants. To families stretching every dime until it creaks.

They will pay more, on average, because they are more sensitive to the number that suddenly doesn’t count anymore.

Trump’s new system delivers a simple message:

If you can’t afford to use a card, you don’t deserve exact change.

Some people will lose pennies per purchase. But those pennies become dollars each month — real dollars that buy bread, diapers, bus fare, medicine. Dollars that matter.

If inflation is the invisible tax on the working class, forced rounding is the punchline the wealthy have been waiting for.

And like most jokes in Trump’s economy, only one side of the room is laughing.

The Inflation Admission We Weren’t Supposed to Notice

Eliminating the penny isn’t just an economic tweak; it’s a confession.

It’s the government admitting: “The dollar has lost so much value that the smallest coin is now worthless.”

This misdirection is a bold stance for a president who campaigned on winning “bigly” for the American worker. The end of the penny tells the truth that Trump cannot: Wages stagnated. Prices soared. And the people who feel it aren’t the ones making policy.

You don’t remove a unit of currency when it remains useful. You remove it when the economy has eroded beneath that value — when the system can no longer spare even a penny to those who need it.

If the penny is worthless, what does that make the Americans who depend on it?

Lincoln Disappears — Again

There’s also a cultural insult hidden in the rollout.

Of all our denominations, the penny carries Lincoln. The president who ended the Confederacy. The president who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. The president considered the moral spine of the nation’s founding promises.

So, who benefits most from erasing his likeness from everyday circulation?

The same ideologues are now rewriting school curricula to downplay slavery.

The same donors who call the Civil War a “states’ rights dispute.”

The same movement that insists heritage matters more than history, so long as that heritage is confederate-flavored.

If you believe symbols don’t matter, ask those who remove them most aggressively. They’ve built a movement on symbolism.

Lincoln disappearing from public life — penny by penny — was not a bug.

It was the feature.

The Performance State Strikes Again

Everything in Trump’s second term operates according to a simple stage rule:

Big gestures that change nothing lead to applause. Small shifts that degrade daily life result in silence.

Cancel the penny and you get to claim:

• You’re saving taxpayers’ money

• You’re simplifying government

• You’re “finally fixing” something

But no corporate profiteering is prevented.

No inflation is solved.

No wages are raised.

No corruption is reduced.

It is the appearance of competence with none of the work.

It is government by magic trick: “Watch me eliminate waste!”— while ignoring the bonfire behind the curtain.

A performance state cannot allow the public to focus on substantive issues. It must always give them something trivial to applaud or jeer while the real machinery of power grinds unchecked behind the scrim.

The penny is today’s punchline. Tomorrow’s punchline might be your vote.

Petty Authoritarianism: A Beginner’s Guide

Autocrats rarely start with tanks. They start with:

• Symbols

• Institutions nobody defends

• Decisions that make rational people roll their eyes

• Changes that seem too tiny to matter

Then, once the public has been trained to ignore the small stuff, the big stuff doesn’t feel so big anymore.

A penny here.

A regulation there.

A constitutional right somewhere behind that.

Petty tyranny is still tyranny.

It just takes smaller bites.

And by the time you ask, “When did this begin?”

You’ll find the answer lying face-down in a gutter — minted 1987, scratched, worth nothing.

A Country Without Spare Change

There’s a larger truth lurking beneath the copper: A nation that eliminates its lowest denomination is unconsciously declaring that the lowest-valued people no longer count.

It says:

• Precision is too expensive.

• Fairness is too complex.

• Justice is unaffordable.

It says: “We will round your life to the nearest convenient outcome.”

That outcome will never turn in your favor.

And as the gap widens between those who get rounded up and those rounded down, the old promise — that everyone counts — becomes just another discontinued item.

Someday, your grandchildren will ask: “Why don’t pennies exist anymore?”

And you’ll have a choice:

• Tell them the truth: “Because our leaders stopped believing small values mattered.”

• Or lie: “Because it was more efficient.”

The most dangerous lies are the ones that sound like common sense.

Keep the Change — Because You Still Believe in It

If democracy means anything, it means small people matter.

Small dollars matter.

Small voices matter.

Small votes matter.

We have been conditioned to treat pennies as trash — something to sweep into bins marked TAKE A PENNY / LEAVE A PENNY. But that dime-store institution was proof that Americans once believed:

Value is shared.

Value circulates.

Value returns.

So here is the actual subversion: Every time you check your receipt, every time you ask for exact change, every time you count the cost of your groceries down to the cent —You are defying a government that asked you to stop paying attention.

In the performance state, awareness is rebellion.

Accountability is resistance.

Pennies are political.

Trump eliminated them to keep change scarce.

We hold onto them — metaphorically and literally — to prove that change remains possible.

Because when a government stops counting cents, it isn’t long before it stops counting citizens.

~Dunneagin

PS If you enjoyed this chapter of our national chaos chronicles, you’ll love the eBooks — a curated archive of America’s ongoing attempt to govern itself while on fire.

Collected volumes are available on Kindle (Trump’s Big Top: How Politics Became a 3-Ring Circus) and Gumroad (The Liar’s Guide to Autocracy & Mr. Dunneagin Speaks, Vol. 2).

When Donald Trump pulled the plug on minting new pennies — declaring the humble one-cent coin a relic of “government inefficiency” — many Americans shrugged. After all, a penny is hardly worth the metal that gives it form. It hides in our laundry, clinks uselessly in tip jars, and accumulates in mason jars atop refrigerators until we forget about the jar entirely. Even the old expression — “A penny for your thoughts” — sounds like an insult in a world where inflation has rendered thoughts a luxury.

So, when the administration said, “We’re eliminating the penny,” the country laughed politely and moved on. Comedy shows jumped on the news for one cycle. Pundits chattered about “common-sense reform.” And the president basked in headlines for saving a rounding error on the national ledger.

But the decision to kill America’s oldest coin — the last metallic echo of Lincoln’s face that millions interact with daily — is not a joke. It’s a signal. And if we don’t examine what’s being signaled, we’ll discover one day soon that something much larger than change has disappeared.

🎧 Listen to the narrated edition of: Penniless by Design: How Trump Eliminated Change to Keep America in Its Place (9 minutes, 36 seconds).

Trump did not eliminate the penny by accident. He did it because real change — economic, social, democratic — is precisely what he cannot afford the public to have.

Little Things Matter — Until They’re Gone

The penny has been with us since 1793. It predates the White House, the Louisiana Purchase, and the idea of California. It has survived depressions, recessions, and more than a few presidents who would have happily swapped Lincoln’s stern visage for their own.

It was also our most accessible denomination — a coin anyone could afford to leave or take. A child’s first ownership of money often began with a penny. A reminder that value, however small, still belonged to the holder.

So, when a leader declares that a small value is no longer worth preserving, what he is really saying is:

Small people are no longer worth considering.

Most people won’t complain. It feels trifling — like arguing over toothpicks during a house fire. But history tells us authoritarians love starting with symbols that make decent people feel silly for objecting. Pennies are perfect for that.

If you won’t defend the smallest unit of value in your society, you’re far less likely to protect the next thing that gets rounded away.

Rounding Errors and the Price of Dignity

Officially, the justification is mathematical: rounding to the nearest nickel saves time, money, and the annoyance of coin counting.

In practice, rounding favors the party with the power to round.

And that isn’t you.

When cash purchases are totaled at the register, prices are rounded in whatever direction best “streamlines” the transaction. And who uses cash more than any other group? The wealthy? Tech-savvy suburbanites tapping phones? Bitcoin bros?

No. Cash belongs to the poor. To workers. To migrants. To families stretching every dime until it creaks.

They will pay more, on average, because they are more sensitive to the number that suddenly doesn’t count anymore.

Trump’s new system delivers a simple message:

If you can’t afford to use a card, you don’t deserve exact change.

Some people will lose pennies per purchase. But those pennies become dollars each month — real dollars that buy bread, diapers, bus fare, medicine. Dollars that matter.

If inflation is the invisible tax on the working class, forced rounding is the punchline the wealthy have been waiting for.

And like most jokes in Trump’s economy, only one side of the room is laughing.

The Inflation Admission We Weren’t Supposed to Notice

Eliminating the penny isn’t just an economic tweak; it’s a confession.

It’s the government admitting: “The dollar has lost so much value that the smallest coin is now worthless.”

This misdirection is a bold stance for a president who campaigned on winning “bigly” for the American worker. The end of the penny tells the truth that Trump cannot: Wages stagnated. Prices soared. And the people who feel it aren’t the ones making policy.

You don’t remove a unit of currency when it remains useful. You remove it when the economy has eroded beneath that value — when the system can no longer spare even a penny to those who need it.

If the penny is worthless, what does that make the Americans who depend on it?

Lincoln Disappears — Again

There’s also a cultural insult hidden in the rollout.

Of all our denominations, the penny carries Lincoln. The president who ended the Confederacy. The president who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. The president considered the moral spine of the nation’s founding promises.

So, who benefits most from erasing his likeness from everyday circulation?

The same ideologues are now rewriting school curricula to downplay slavery.

The same donors who call the Civil War a “states’ rights dispute.”

The same movement that insists heritage matters more than history, so long as that heritage is confederate-flavored.

If you believe symbols don’t matter, ask those who remove them most aggressively. They’ve built a movement on symbolism.

Lincoln disappearing from public life — penny by penny — was not a bug.

It was the feature.

The Performance State Strikes Again

Everything in Trump’s second term operates according to a simple stage rule:

Big gestures that change nothing lead to applause. Small shifts that degrade daily life result in silence.

Cancel the penny and you get to claim:

• You’re saving taxpayers’ money

• You’re simplifying government

• You’re “finally fixing” something

But no corporate profiteering is prevented.

No inflation is solved.

No wages are raised.

No corruption is reduced.

It is the appearance of competence with none of the work.

It is government by magic trick: “Watch me eliminate waste!”— while ignoring the bonfire behind the curtain.

A performance state cannot allow the public to focus on substantive issues. It must always give them something trivial to applaud or jeer while the real machinery of power grinds unchecked behind the scrim.

The penny is today’s punchline. Tomorrow’s punchline might be your vote.

Petty Authoritarianism: A Beginner’s Guide

Autocrats rarely start with tanks. They start with:

• Symbols

• Institutions nobody defends

• Decisions that make rational people roll their eyes

• Changes that seem too tiny to matter

Then, once the public has been trained to ignore the small stuff, the big stuff doesn’t feel so big anymore.

A penny here.

A regulation there.

A constitutional right somewhere behind that.

Petty tyranny is still tyranny.

It just takes smaller bites.

And by the time you ask, “When did this begin?”

You’ll find the answer lying face-down in a gutter — minted 1987, scratched, worth nothing.

A Country Without Spare Change

There’s a larger truth lurking beneath the copper: A nation that eliminates its lowest denomination is unconsciously declaring that the lowest-valued people no longer count.

It says:

• Precision is too expensive.

• Fairness is too complex.

• Justice is unaffordable.

It says: “We will round your life to the nearest convenient outcome.”

That outcome will never turn in your favor.

And as the gap widens between those who get rounded up and those rounded down, the old promise — that everyone counts — becomes just another discontinued item.

Someday, your grandchildren will ask: “Why don’t pennies exist anymore?”

And you’ll have a choice:

• Tell them the truth: “Because our leaders stopped believing small values mattered.”

• Or lie: “Because it was more efficient.”

The most dangerous lies are the ones that sound like common sense.

Keep the Change — Because You Still Believe in It

If democracy means anything, it means small people matter.

Small dollars matter.

Small voices matter.

Small votes matter.

We have been conditioned to treat pennies as trash — something to sweep into bins marked TAKE A PENNY / LEAVE A PENNY. But that dime-store institution was proof that Americans once believed:

Value is shared.

Value circulates.

Value returns.

So here is the actual subversion: Every time you check your receipt, every time you ask for exact change, every time you count the cost of your groceries down to the cent —You are defying a government that asked you to stop paying attention.

In the performance state, awareness is rebellion.

Accountability is resistance.

Pennies are political.

Trump eliminated them to keep change scarce.

We hold onto them — metaphorically and literally — to prove that change remains possible.

Because when a government stops counting cents, it isn’t long before it stops counting citizens.

~Dunneagin

PS If you enjoyed this chapter of our national chaos chronicles, you’ll love the eBooks — a curated archive of America’s ongoing attempt to govern itself while on fire.

Collected volumes are available on Kindle (Trump’s Big Top: How Politics Became a 3-Ring Circus) and Gumroad (The Liar’s Guide to Autocracy & Mr. Dunneagin Speaks, Vol. 2).