“On 12/23/25 Fred Smith was wrongfully charged and arrested for using ‘counterfeit money’ at Kwik Trip. But what actually happened is that Fred had a novelty $100 bill that was not at all an attempt at being a fake $100, mixed in with his other cash and debit card. He left that along with his debit card (which had more than enough to cover his bill). Kwik Trip failed to authenticate the money he used then proceeded to call the cops and officers arrived to Fred’s house and arrested him,” says the intro to the currently paused GoFundMe campaign headlined “Support Fred Smith’s Fight Against Injustice,” launched by the family of the 75 year-old Blue Mounds, Wisconsin resident and Purple Heart-recipient Vietnam combat vet who paid for his lottery scratch-offs with a “novelty” $100 bill.

Possibly to make Fred more sympathetic, the family omitted the detail found in a Mount Horeb Police Department press release following the arrest, stating plainly that the “100-dollar bill was realistic in appearance including size, and design including holograms and 3D blue security ribbon, but did have an image of Donald Trump rather than Benjamin Franklin,” emphasis added on the face depicted on the obverse of the bill. Badger State MAGA propaganda site Wisconsin Right Now on Friday put together a lengthy account of Fred’s predicament: A disabled widower who’s suffered from lifelong health issues after getting shot five times in Vietnam, requiring a year-long hospital stay in the 1970s – issues that have gotten worse in recent months and have caused him to slip mentally – and he now faces a “Forgery-Uttering charge,” six years max, over the incident.

“It is truly unfortunate that anyone has to spend the holidays in jail,” the press release continued and yeah, Smith was in the clink from Tuesday the 23rd until Friday the 26th. “The officer in this case investigated the incident and made a decision that was supported by policy and statute.”

The Wisconsin Right Now piece is heavy on advocacy for Smith – with this asshole writing “there is a concept called mens rea in criminal law” to an audience that are supposed to be sophisticated conservatives – and light on the facts of the actual transaction. However it can be pieced together that Smith asked the cashier for at least $150 worth of scratch-offs as Smith’s daughter, Molly Schmock, told the right wing site that he had paid with two $50 bills with the $100 fake Trump bill in between them and that the cops arrested Smith at his home sometime later in the day, having tracked him there from footage of his license plate and/or the debit card he left on the counter

What’s interesting and effective about the article is the inversion of the intent element in that all the shit about how Fred’s a victim of law enforcement overreacting to incidents of counterfeit money being used at convenience stores – might be a safe bet he wasn’t so outraged when a non-MAGA, non-caucasian, non-Vietnam veteran’s neck was fatally crushed under the knee of a racist cop in a neighboring state for the same crime (just $80 less in fake money) five years ago. The intent of the writing is to confuse and overwhelm the judgment of a reader who might simply want to weigh all the facts and make a subjective determination of Fred’s level of intent on their own.

So the simplest conclusion is yes, he did it intentionally.

You wouldn’t be seeing his stupid daughter going on and on and on and on like this if she believed her dad was truly 100 percent innocent. This just screams consciousness of guilt – maybe mixing in some of her guilt over letting Fred freeze his ass off in jail on friggin Christmas – and she knows her dad did it intentionally. All this shit about how the Kwik Trip cashier should have been more understanding that a guy who walked out with $150+ in scratch-offs after paying in part with a fucking Trump bill should’ve been more understanding and did the extra work to make sure the cops didn’t have to arrest Fred, the bitching about how the cops/county jail treated him without so much as a hint of a pending civil complaint that would face the scrutiny of a court of law, or – more importantly – a word from Fred himself in any part of this Wisconsin right now article.

Plus the non-specific nature of the “novelty $100 bill” in the GoFundMe, a decision by someone fully aware that the Trump fake money element could make it more challenging to raise real money.

Tempting as it is to just leave it at “George Floyd would’ve preferred spending Christmas in county jail over getting murdered slowly and horrifically while begging powerless bystanders to intervene” there is one other intriguing possibility about the nature of Fred’s intent or lack thereof:

Back in 2023, a Bank of America spokesman told NBC News that it was “hard to put a number on how many people have come in” to branches under the impression that their “Trump bucks” are could be deposited “in banks such as JP Morgan Chase, the Bank of America and Wells Fargo” or at retailers like “Walmart, Costco and Home Depot” as one very poorly-produced 2022 ad said after twice saying that they’re not actual legal tender. One assclown who said he spent $2,700 only to be turned away told NBC he’s “questioning whether he is aware of this,” the “he” being Trump, lol.

A Florida woman said her elderly mother-in-law kept insisting that her Trump Bucks were the real deal, so she drove the old lady to a bank branch and walked her up to a teller to see if she could cash it in. “We thought she got it, she even admitted she got scammed,” the Florida woman said.

“But then giant boxes arrived at the house full of Trump checks and other stuff that she bought for $500 and that would supposedly be worth $6 million. We tell her she’s getting scammed and she says, ‘Just wait, Trump will make all the patriots rich.’ It’s like she’s in a cult,” the Florida woman said.

Yeah, “it’s like” that. Definitely almost “like” a cult.

That Fred Smith sincerely believed his $100 Trump bill was in fact legal tender is plausible and not at all in tension with his daughter’s spin or the fairly muted statements from local law enforcement: The whole situation is embarrassing enough for all involved, why make it worse by publicly announcing that his criminal behavior was criminally insane MAGA cultism from just one of the millions of broken-down old boomers who continue to bleed for the Orange God Emperor’s glory?