CNN reporter Kate Bennett, in her January 13, 2022 article entitled “Melania Trump’s hat auction has even those who know her scratching their heads,” interviewed John Reznikoff, founder and president of University Archives, to seek his professional opinion about the former First Lady’s chances of selling an autographed hat worn on a state occasion for an opening bid of $250,000.

CNN asked John Reznikoff if Melania Trump’s high auction hopes may be misplaced. CNN said: “Reznikoff, who has been valuing historic items for auction for 40 years, noted that Trump being alive and not as universally beloved as Kennedy, for example, makes the quarter-of-a-million dollar opening bid for her NFT, signed hat and watercolor wildly over-valued. ‘If I were advising her as a client -- and I'm nonpolitical -- I would advise a client that a better opening price for the hat alone would be $5,000,’ said Reznikoff. He thinks the "I really don't care. Do u?" jacket could fetch more, and so perhaps would the pith helmet Trump wore in Africa that made headlines. But he added even those would be nowhere near $250,000.

Kennedy's estate famously went to auction at Sotheby's in 1996, two years after her death, and the sale of her personal effects garnered millions of dollars for her family, with most items going well above their initial estimations. Reznikoff said Kennedy's decades-long popularity and fashion icon status, as well as the vast range of historic and mundane personal effects, were the ideal recipe for a multi-million dollar haul.”

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