Trump supporters have a new daddy

Fast Company

5 hours ago

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 featuring his own mugshot captioned with the word 'Daddy.'
The shirt, featured in an email newsletter sent from the Trump National Committee JFC, Inc. to subscribers on Thursday, appears to be a limited-time offering separate from the official Trump store. It's being sold through its own webpage with the notice, 'These are going to sell FAST. HURRY, claim your shirt today,' as well as the somewhat more unsettling 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 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' at this point.
However, the use of the moniker 'Daddy' is altogether new. It seems to be a nod to a comment made by NATO Secretary Mark Rutte on Wednesday, who appeared to give Trump the title when he said, 'Daddy has to sometimes use strong language.' The media (and, now, it seems, the Trump administration) 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—but, 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 Ritter's use to the term 'daddy' at a later press conference. Now, it seems, the Trump National Committee is shortening the lifecycle 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.