I made my regular Memorial Day trip to a beach resort – in this case, Hampton Beach in New Hampshire – to see what the latest summer stuff was. Usually there are new things at the beach, new video games and high-tech pinball games at the arcades, and new T-shirts at the many, many T-shirt emporiums.
I was disappointed to see almost nothing new this year.
However, I did have to ask about something else I’ve noticed for the past several years – the Pro-Trump T-shirts. THere are a LOT of them. And virtually nothing from the other side.
IT’s not as if I really expect a pro-Biden or pro-Kamala Harris shirts. But I DO kind of expect anti-Trump shirts. I saw that kind of thing when Trump first emerged as a candidate – shirts that showed Trump with Joker makeup and the like. But since then, through his first term, through Biden’s, and now into his second term I see nothing but pro-trump shirts.
And not just at Hampton Beach, but at other beaches I’ve been to on the East Coast and at resorts on lakes – at Weirs beach on Lake Winnepesaukee and at Lake George in New York.
So why is this? Do only pro-Trump people go to the resorts? Or are they the only ones buying T-shirts? Does being at a resort inspire a rebel attitude that makes this stuff popular?
Perhaps they aren’t selling them because nobody would buy anti-Trump t-shirts since they might be afraid to walk around in public wearing one. I wouldn’t want to be the target of some MAGA nutcase, would you?
It is this. There is a market for pro-Trump merchandise. There is not a market for anti-Trump merchandise. And many folks would be (rightly) scared to wear an anti-Trump shirt in public even if they agreed with sentiment.
Not so many opposite numbers to the pro-Trumpers who rock the t-shirt over the fat gut, baggy shorts and flip flops so they can look tough in line at the Circle K.
It’s more of an online presence, seen on TikTok in the current trend of vids where they plead “Somebody - just do it.” and then may or may not add an innocuous activity at the end for plausible deniability. But the implication is clear.
The short version is MAGA is a cult of personality and MAGATs are venerating their object of worship. An interesting phenomenon with the cult of personality surrounding Trump is how membership has become a core part of how people identify themselves. They don’t just vote Republican, they’re not even just MAGA, they’re “Ultra-MAGA!” And it’s not enough for them to be Ultra-MAGA, they’ve got to signal to everyone around them that they’re Ulta-MAGA.
The United States has been primed for fascism for the last four decades (or longer if you want to stretch back to Goldwater, and of course the Jim Crow era in the South), and now people are nakedly expressing support for a fascist-adjacent leader who happily proclaims his desire to be dictator (“Just on Day One,” because autocrats always give up their power once they’ve achieved petty goals) and feeling like they are part of some big scheme to return to a mythical era of greatness that never existed.
This is America. Land of the formerly free, home of the self-professed ‘brave’ as long as it is in being part of a mob of bigots and thugs.
There’s demonstrably a market for anti-Trump merchandise. I’ve posted examples of T-shirts, but there are as many anti-Trump items (posters, mugs, signs, toilet paper, etc.) as the pro-Trumpers have. But they’re not selling any of it at the resorts.
I see it online and at convention sales booths. You could “of course it’ll be sold at groups where pro-Leftists congregate”, but that makes you ask – “so are resorts pro-rightist?”
If it’s a place where a lot of MAGAs would buy and wear Trump shirts the vendors might also be afraid of having their shops vandalized by the MAGA nutcases if they displayed anti-Trump merch. Much safer to sell online.
If you were had enough money to go to resorts in Germany in the late 30’s/early 40’s, do you think pro-Jewish apparel would be worn (or even sold) in many places? Pro-Trumpers can be very aggressive, and this open aggression is openly supported by a large part of society and even, at times, the government itself.
I honestly wouldn’t expect a lot of pro-Jewish apparel back then. But I would expect some anti-Hitler merchandise, at least at first. Hitler’s brownshirts were definitely a thing. But MAGAts can’t be compared to them. At least not yet.
I guess they figured “outlaw” had a better ring to it than “convicted felon”. (And similarly, “hillbilly” sounds more of-the-people than “metropolitan Cincinnati native, Yale Law School graduate, and failed agricultural startup director”.)
Except that I haven’t heard of much anti-Hitler merchandise sold in Germany in the time period I mentioned, so haw bad does it actually have to get before you start comparing them to MAGAs? Give me an actual tipping point.
If the demographics at these resorts skew white, and age 40+, they probably do skew towards MAGA supporters, because, frankly, those demographics have traditionally skewed conservative, anyway, even before Trump.
Yes, some 40+, 50+, 60+ people, including many of us on this board, are very liberal. But, looking broadly at demographics, we’re in the minority; as a general rule of thumb, older cohorts are more politically conservative than younger ones.
What we don’t know is how well the anti-Trump merchandise sells, compared to the pro-Trump stuff. As @Odesio notes, for a lot of MAGA folks, being Trumpy is highly analogous to being a rabid fan of a sports team, which means having (and proudly wearing) all the merch; there’s probably an aspect of “triggering the libs” by openly wearing the stuff for some of them, as well. I’m not at all certain that among anti-Trump people, there’s broadly that same level of rabid desire to self-identify to the world.
“Sold”, hmmm. I don’t think of political sloganeering (on any side) in 1930’s Germany as in any significant way a commercial enterprise sustained by individual consumerism: ISTM that partisan paraphernalia was overwhelmingly distributed by the parties rather than marketed for profit. But that may well be just my ignorance.
During a trip to the US a couple of years ago (Jul-2023) I stopped in Custer, SD for a couple of days. The apparel souvenir shops were stocked to the gunnels with an extensive range of fire-breathing MAGA merchandise hats, t-shirts, sloppy joes.
Was chatting with the owner, who after ascertaining I was Australian, confided that she voted Libertarian and thought that the majority of apparel was actually bought by Democrats.
Let’s see.
I specified the late 30’s to the early 40’s, and your example was from 1931. How often did anti-Hitler merchandise pop up during the time period I mentioned?