Is Donald Trump Jr. Seriously Trying To Hawk Pride Merch?

Pride Month is always fun because in addition to getting a month packed with events celebrating LGBTQIA+ life and commemorating our history, we also get to enjoy the spectacle of watching corporate brands and questionable agencies try to convince us that they’re allies.

The phenomenon is so prevalent during Pride month, it’s been turned into a fantastic meme:

But the actual, real-life examples are truly beyond parody:

Of all the people, brands, government agencies, and military branches that have tried to cash in on Pride month, though, I don’t think anything could have prepared me for Donald Trump Jr., son and surrogate mouthpiece to one of the most bigoted, oppressive leaders in modern U.S. history, to try to get in on the Pride merch game.

Don Jr. has an extensive merch store on his website—most of which are shirts that look straight out of your worst uncle’s targeted Facebook ads. But among those, there’s this monstrosity:

Yes, Don Jr. departed from the oh-so-clever “Let’s Go Brandon” slogan that appears on most of these anti-Biden items to co-opt the LGBTQ acronym as an acrostic for “Let’s Get Biden To Quit.” I would like to meet the person who would buy and wear this, solely so that I can plan the rest of my entire life around avoiding them.

On Thursday night, Jimmy Kimmel also did a segment on the hypocrisy of Don Jr.’s merch, which proudly declares itself to be “American owned & operated” and “Designed and Printed in the USA!” The hats claim to be “Designed & Embroidered in the USA!” But—surprise, surprise—they’re not actually made in the U.S.

The Daily Beast writes:

For instance, Kimmel drew attention to a hat that reads “FJB”—short for “Fuck Joe Biden”—that “may have been designed and embroidered here, but we ordered one of the hats and boy, you’re not gonna believe this, it was actually made in, how about that, China.”

“You won’t find that on his website though,” the host added, presenting product after product, from a “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt to one that reads “Let’s Get Biden to Quit” (“Just in time for Pride Month”) to the “lovely sentiment,” “In a World Full of Alecs, Be a Kyle” that were manufactured in countries like Nicaragua and El Salvador.

(image: screencap)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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