The former president’s campaign and independent sellers are printing his dark transfer photo on coffee mugs, T-shirts and bumper stickers.
First came the photo. Then came the merchandise.
A few hours from Donald Trump turned over to the authorities of Fulton County, Georgia, pasted posts featuring the scowling former president in his cherry red suit and tie have been published. everywhere on Etsy, eBay and the custom design site Redbubble.
own The Trump campaign took action: On Thursday night, he sent an email asking for a $47 donation in exchange for a T-shirt printed with the photo above the phrase “Never give up.” The showcase of online products of your campaign now includes T-shirts, soft drinks and a bumper sticker with the transfer photo.
The former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., was also selling a $30 t-shirt and a $16 coffee mug bearing the photo, claiming the proceeds from sales would be donated to his father’s legal defense fund . Etsy’s designers have started including ‘Legend’ and ‘NOT GUILTY’ t-shirts below Trump’s image.
In near record time, Trump’s photo joined the beret face of Che Guevara poking fun at Bart Simpson and the goofy Minions as a wearable meme, the kind of image you’ll find in gift shops and thrift store shelves for years to come.
“It’s just a great cultural moment,” said Eliana Sarto, who works in digital marketing in New York and sells items on Etsy on the side. He added products from photos of Trump to his store on Thursday night and received 20 orders overnight.
“It’s a good handbag,” said Sarto, who noted that coffee mugs were top sellers. His theory? People love the literal mug joke.
Jennifer Daniels, a 53-year-old nurse from Palm Coast, Florida, bought a shot glass bearing Trump’s picture. He assured that he did not like the former president, but that he wanted a object to commemorate a historical moment.
He paid $15 for the glass sold by the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group. He said he planned to display the article in his bar, but delay any plans to drink it . “If they condemn it, I will do it to celebrate,” he said.
Trump’s appropriation of his own transfer photo – the first to be taken from a former president from the United States – could be a smart strategy. “It weakens you a bit if you don’t care” about the charges, said Brock Shelby, a business consultant in Sugar Land, Texas, who sells T-shirts as accessories on Etsy.
“We know the goal is to try to embarrass him somehow, but I think it will backfire,” said Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law. at Newsmax this week. “This photo, wait for her, she’ll be on posters in people’s rooms, it will be on t-shirts. It will be a flag flown by people who love this country because they support Donald Trump. »
Although authorities have not taken photos in Trump’s three previous indictments, Fulton County has made it clear that it will give the former president his moment on camera.
“We follow our normal practices and therefore no matter your status we have pictures ready for you,” Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labat said at a news conference in early August, before the charges were announced.
As co-conspirators accused of running a criminal enterprise seeking to undo President Joe Biden’s election victory in Georgia turned themselves in this week, the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office He published the photographs of his signature.
A photo of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani wearing a red striped suit and tie circulated online Wednesday afternoon. Less than 24 hours later, sellers on Etsy were offering Giuliani items with photo IDs, such as a $24 t-shirt and $18 mug which read “America’s Mayor,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to his nickname after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, next to the photo.
Some service providers did not wait for the A photo of Trump has been circulating on the internet. In the weeks leading up to his signing in Georgia, online marketplaces like eBay, Etsy and Amazon were already flooded with computer-generated versions of Trump’s photo.
Before Trump’s surrender to the authorities from Georgia, Shelby, a business consultant in Texas, was selling a T-shirt on Etsy with a digital image of Trump being mugged, which he had created using artificial intelligence software Midjourney. By his own admission, the fake photo “wasn’t as good as it could have been,” but until Thursday. had sold between 50 and 100 t-shirts .
Some vendors offered T-shirts with pictures praising and ridiculing the former president. “In fact, there many people who are dedicated to double investment ,” making “pro-liberal, pro-conservative” products, Shelby said. For these sellers, dollar value trumps political purity.
Trump has no image rights: it is property of the sheriff’s office of Fulton County, said Jane C. Ginsburg, professor of copyright law at Columbia Law School. “The photographer owns the copyright, not the subject,” he said. His mother, the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was the inspiration for many products which showed off her face and characteristic lace collar.
The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, which sent the signing photos to the media, He did not answer to requests for comments.
Professor Ginsburg could not think of a case where a law enforcement agency had exercised their rights to the transferred photographs. As for the Fulton County Sheriff, he said, “People could reasonably conclude based on the fact that by releasing the photos, they weren’t going to make a private claim about them”.
Source: Latercera
I’m Rose Brown , a journalist and writer with over 10 years of experience in the news industry. I specialize in covering tennis-related news for Athletistic, a leading sports media website. My writing is highly regarded for its quick turnaround and accuracy, as well as my ability to tell compelling stories about the sport.
