Richard Kligman didn’t set out to sell President Donald Trump and “Make America Great Again” merch. But Kligman spotted a business opportunity in 2016, when customers began asking for MAGA hats and flags at the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina kite shop he ran with his brother. The duo opened their Trump Super Store in the empty storefront next door in 2018 to keep up with the demand.
“You’d have thought I was selling crack,” Kligman jokingly told Fortune. But now he wants out.
“You have to read the writing on the wall that as we go into ‘27, it’s definitely going to fall off, and I’d like to be out of it as much as I could be by the end of ‘27,” he said.
Sales were “going gangbusters,” Kligman said, between the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, and the brothers were putting in seven days a week just to keep up with demand from both locals and visitors from around the country.
But now, Kligman said sales of Trump-branded merch have since fallen 39% from their 2024 levels.
“A lot of the Trump merchandise stores across the country are closing because they see that things are going to change a bit, and the demand is not what it once was,” Kligman said. “It’s absolutely gone down, but it had to because he can’t run again.”
Kligman isn’t alone in thinking this. The “Make America Great Again” slogan helped Trump win the White House in 2016 and has been plastered over hats, shirts, flags and other collectibles for more than a decade. But MAGA merch sellers and suppliers across the country told Fortune their sales have fallen from the heights of the 2024 election. That’s when Amazon sellers reported an estimated $140 million in Trump-themed merch from April through September, according to e-commerce marketing platform Omnisend. Sellers have cut prices, closed stores, branched into other patriotic merchandise or turned to Trump’s rallies for sales. But with Trump barred by the Constitution from another presidential run, the business faces an uncertain future after he leaves office.
Steven Slaton, who has run the Trumped Store and Coffee Shop in Show Low, Arizona for a decade with his wife Karen, told Fortune he’s felt the change, saying sales now are “night and day” compared to the 2016 and 2024 election seasons. He estimated that Trump merch sales in September were down 20% to 25% from the same month in 2024. He and Karen have started clearing out older merch, marking hats and shirts that once cost $30 down to $10.
“It’s like everybody took a big, deep breath and then everybody’s looking for a new type of gear,” Slaton said.
Slaton attributed part of the decline to customers with less money to spend as food, housing and gas prices strain their budgets. Economic dissatisfaction is also weighing on Trump politically. A Fox News poll from Oct. 14 found that 77% of registered voters disapproved of his handling of inflation, and 70% disapproved of his handling of the economy, and his overall approval rating fell to 36%, the lowest recorded by Fox News during either of Trump’s two presidencies.
The sales decline is severe enough for some stores to close. Fortune found that this year alone, at least three independent Trump merch stores have closed—in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee—including one that made 350 sales a day at an average of $60 each.
Less demand for MAGA merch also means less business for merch manufacturers. Eric Turney, sales director of custom product manufacturing firm The Monterey Company, told Fortune the company earned about $250,000 in 2024 making MAGA hats, keychains, and buttons for nine wholesalers, but now has only three regular wholesalers for that same merch.
“Once he went into office, [demand] really dropped off the face of the cliff,” Turney said, noting that Monterey used to get an average of 15 merch orders per month in 2024, but only 13 in total from 2025 to this year.
Online interest in MAGA hats is also down. After peaking in Google search popularity in December 2018 and November 2024, interest in the search term “MAGA hat” has plummeted by 95% as of October, according to Google Trends data.
Rallies are a bright spot, but the strategy is still shifting
Trump’s rallies for Republican midterm candidates have given some sellers a boost even as other MAGA merch sales slow. Ronald Solomon, president of The MAGA Mall, a wholesaler and retailer of Republican and conservative-branded products, told Fortune rallies renewed demand for MAGA and Trump 2028 hats, recalling selling “a tremendous amount” of them at a rally in Vandalia, Ohio last week. The Trump Organization itself began offering $50 “Trump 2028” hats in April 2025.
“During the summer, the MAGA stuff wasn’t selling as much, but now all of a sudden it’s selling a lot again,” Solomon said.
But his MAGA product sales in recent months are down 34% from 2024. He attributes the decline to 2026 being a midterm year. “There’s no way I expected it to be as brisk as a presidential year,” he said. For some sellers, though, the slowdown has pushed them to change strategy.
Sany Dash, who said she has sold $63 million in Trump merch over the past nine years, closed all three of her USA Trump Stores this year because revenue fell so far: two in Texas (Gainesville and Arlington) and one in Loveland, Colorado. She might open one in Dallas, but she will focus on selling patriotic-themed jewelry and clothing at rallies and other political events, where she estimates 40% to 50% of attendees buy merch.
“The stores are not doing well, but the rallies are doing incredibly good,” Dash said. “We have to look at, logistically, where we’re going to open up our new store, and it may not say Trump—it may just say ‘patriotic merch,’ I don’t know yet.”
Dash sells merch only for Trump and doubts the MAGA merch brand will have the same pull after he leaves office.
“After Trump is gone, I don’t see MAGA continue because Trump is the face of MAGA,” she said.
Slaton is preparing for that possibility, too. He said the Trumped Store might change its name and offerings to support whoever becomes the new Republican figurehead.
“We’re telling people we’ll probably transition over to JD Vance or Marco [Rubio] or whomever the prospective nominee is going to be,” he said. “We’ll have to figure out how we’re going to do that.”
