Trump supporters have a new daddy
Donald Trump is no stranger to selling unusual merch. The president has been known to slap his likeness on Bibles, guitars, and gold-plated phones if it’ll bring in a bit of cash. Just last year, the Trump Organization’s licensing deals netted Trump tens of millions of dollars in profits. But today, Trump has outdone himself with what has to be his strangest piece of merch ever: a T-shirt emblazoned with his own mug shot and captioned DADDY (yes, in all caps).
The “Trump Daddy” shirt, featured in an email newsletter sent to subscribers on June 26 from the Trump National Committee JFC, appears to be a limited-time offering separate from the official Trump store. It’s being sold through its own web page with the notice “These are going to sell FAST. HURRY, claim your shirt today,” as well as the somewhat more unsettling all-caps call to action “CLAIM DADDY SHIRT.”
The merch-ification of Trump’s mug shot is a fairly tired tack at this point, given that the president has already sold pieces of the suit worn in the image, reprinted it on rally posters, and used it as inspiration for his official White House portrait. Earlier this month, Cara Finnegan, author of the book Photographic Presidents: Making History From Daguerreotype to Digital, told Fast Company that the mug shot has been used so often by Trump’s administration that it “arguably is his presidential portrait.”
However, the use of the moniker “Daddy” is altogether new. It’s an apparent nod to a comment made June 25 by Mark Rutte, secretary-general of NATO, who appeared to give Trump the title when he said, “Daddy has to sometimes use strong language.” The media (and, now, it seems, Trump’s team) took the comment as a reference to a viral moment earlier in the week when Trump casually dropped the f-bomb on camera.
Rutte has since denied that the term was directed at Trump—unfortunately, that didn’t stop the White House from posting an edit of the president set to Usher’s sexual-innuendo-laden R&B song “Hey Daddy (Daddy’s Home).” Trump himself appeared to endorse Rutte’s use of the term at a later press conference. Now, it seems, the Trump National Committee is shortening the life cycle of real news-turned-meme-turned merch. Mere hours after the initial stir around the “daddy” comment, it’s already a shirt.
It’s not entirely shocking to see Trump’s fundraising committee capitalize on this moment, given that his administration has already thrown convention to the wind by constantly glamorizing his mug shot. Still, this development is markedly more unusual—and if this flies as a kind of presidential merch, we don’t want to know what might appear on a Trump shirt next.
