We live in a golden age of tasteless political merchandise. This is largely thanks to Donald Trump: over the years the president’s official store has flogged everything from hoodies with Joe Biden falling downstairs on them to a T-shirt with a version of the mugshot from his 2023 booking on felony charges (Trump denied wrongdoing).
Trump isn’t the only one. Back in 2019, Senator Mitch McConnell, then Senate majority leader, sold more than 2,000 T-shirts referencing “Cocaine Mitch”. This had nothing to do with his hobbies; it was in response to a nickname given to McConnell by a political rival off the back of a baseless allegation. “One of the things we learned with this whole ‘Cocaine Mitch’ phenomenon is that people are really engaged,” one of the staffers involved in the T-shirt sales said at the time. “They want merchandise.”
