President Trump has built a merchandise behemoth unmatched by any other American politician. The vast economy of tchotchkes and trinkets has become a visceral proxy for the energy behind his political movement, with the products acting as billboards for membership in the club.
Mr. Trump and his family have made millions from the products — more than $1 million from guitars and at least another $2.8 million from the watches alone, according to annual disclosures from the president. And he misses few opportunities to market the wares. He shows off hats and T-shirts at his political rallies, his coins and colognes in advertisements and his cufflinks and candies to visiting dignitaries in a room next to the Oval Office.
But most of the merch business operates beyond the Trump family. A sprawling bazaar of third-party sellers hawks unofficial MAGA wares on card tables during parades and next to animal pelts and Jesus figurines at gun shows. At one point, more than 40 storefronts dedicated entirely to Mr. Trump dotted America’s highways and strip malls. They sell everything from Trump-themed coffee grounds to aprons decorated with the president’s face.
Through dozens of interviews and scores of financial documents, The New York Times mapped the contours of an ecosystem of Trump trinkets that is worth more than $300 million a year, according to one estimate from a market research firm. The reporting reveals that a once-peripheral world of campaign souvenirs has exploded into a wide-reaching marketplace that both feeds off Mr. Trump’s power and reinforces it.
“Everytime somebody buys a hat and wears it, it’s like a yard sign,” said Ronald Solomon, the president of the MAGA Mall, a retail and wholesale operation based in Florida that sells MAGA merchandise, including at least 160 distinct hats. “It creates votes for him.”
Mr. Trump’s official merchandise bolsters more than his campaign coffers — often, it personally enriches the president and his family. He is intent on protecting it, even threatening copycats with cease-and-desist letters and lawsuits. The Trump Organization won a trademark infringement case just this month.
David Warrington, the White House counsel, said in a statement that the president “has no involvement in business deals that would implicate his constitutional responsibilities. President Trump performs his constitutional duties in an ethically sound manner and to suggest otherwise is either ill-informed or malicious.”
Davis Ingle, a spokesman for the White House, said Mr. Trump is “motivated solely by what is best for the American people.”
Mr. Trump has traded on name recognition for nearly his entire adult life. He attached “Trump” in towering letters to buildings in the early 1980s; just a few years later, in 1989, “Trump” was on a board game and an airline he acquired for $365 million. For a few months in 2007, Sharper Image carried the $999 Trump Steaks Connoisseur Collection, promising “by far the best tasting, most flavorful beef that you’ll ever eat.” They didn’t sell well.
Mr. Trump continued his role as chief marketing officer when he entered politics. In the two months before he announced his first presidential campaign in June 2015, his team spent nearly $18,000 printing T-shirts to test their popularity.
Mr. Trump first donned a MAGA hat in July 2015 — though “Make America Great Again” was not his idea. Ronald Reagan had the slogan printed on buttons and posters during his own presidential campaign in 1980 and Bill Clinton used the phrase when running for president in 1991 and 1992. Mr. Trump was the first to trademark it and to profit from it financially.
His campaign eventually spent at least $2.9 million on hats ahead of the election. By 2016, he had opened an official flagship Trump Store at Trump Tower in New York.
Soon after, entrepreneurs — not all of them supporters — spotted an opportunity.
Richard Kligman sold only kites and beach supplies at his store in Myrtle Beach, S.C., in 2016 when something unusual started happening: customers were walking into his store asking for Trump merchandise.
Mr. Kligman, who describes himself as apolitical, contacted one of his merchants and asked for Trump flags. The customer demands didn’t stop there.
“It just became more and more and more,” Mr. Kligman said. When it seemed likely that Mr. Trump was going to win on Election Night that November, he rushed to his computer.
“I immediately emailed my vendor. I said, ‘I need 500 red hats,’” he said.
Now half of his store, Klig’s Kites, is devoted to MAGA. He opened a second location in Myrtle Beach and one of his stores was skewered in an episode of “South Park.” (A third location was closed late last year.)
Many other unofficial merchants began selling bootleg Trump banners and buttons around the same time as Klig’s Kites. These vendors marketed their wares on sites such as Etsy and eBay, on beach boardwalks and state fairs, in strip mall storefronts. They began producing merchandise in the span of hours, printing slogans freshly uttered by the president onto stockpiles of T-shirts — fast fashion, MAGA style.
But their efforts really escalated in 2020. MAGA-minded entrepreneurs in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and elsewhere — some of whom had previously worked for carnivals or other businesses crippled by the pandemic shutdowns — saw an opportunity as Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign galvanized his faithful.
Many of them took cues from Mr. Trump himself, who was increasingly profiting off his policy moves and political tussles. One item in his official store during his re-election campaign was a T-shirt featuring Adam Schiff, the Democratic congressman who was running an impeachment investigation of the president, that referenced an insult from Mr. Trump about the size of Mr. Schiff’s neck. He also sold plastic drinking straws with the description “liberal paper straws don’t work.”
The MAGA merchandise business, however, proved a volatile one. Sales seem to rise and fall with Mr. Trump’s political popularity. His average approval rating, currently hovering around 40 percent, has been slipping for over a year, which could affect demand for products bearing his name.
Many unofficial Trump stores have opened and closed in a boom-bust cycle. A chain in New England that once boasted 22 locations was down to just three by the summer of 2021. A store in Alabama that opened on the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol shut down in March of 2025 and reopened 75 miles south. Around the same time, its owners opened another Trump store in Las Vegas. It closed after five months because they were not allowed to advertise on the Strip, they said.
Last year, there were at least four dozen Trump stores in some 22 states, selling everything from bullet-shaped salt shakers to car fresheners scented like piña colada and looking like Mr. Trump’s face. In eastern Tennessee, in a county that has not voted for a Democrat presidential candidate for well over a century, at least four Trump stores were operating within just 15 miles of one another.
One of them, We The People, in Pigeon Forge, shared a strip mall with the Tennessee Bible Museum and a moonshine depot. On a visit there last year, a reporter for The Times saw $40 Trump garden gnomes sharing space with red, white and blue tinsel Christmas trees dripping with Trump ornaments. The store and other Trump stores throughout Tennessee blasted similar country music and showcased similar wares — everything from flags blaring “Yes, I’m a Trump girl, get over it” to QAnon-branded hoodies and Chinese-produced visors with a shock of yellow highlighter hair.
MAGA customers are often devoted to the president with a fervor bordering on the religious, merchants said. They want products that help them recognize their political brethren while taunting their opponents.
When Lisa Fleischmann wore her first Trump T-shirt in 2022, she felt a little nervous walking down the street in Huntley, Ill., a village northwest of Chicago. But she soon discovered that broadcasting her allegiance to Mr. Trump with a T-shirt — and later hats, sneakers and necklaces — encouraged other Trump fans to do the same.
“You get the good people talking to you and the bad people stay away, you know?” she said in an interview.
Soon her car and trailers were decorated with Trump signs, and if it weren’t for her homeowner’s association rulebook, her house would be covered with Trump flags too. In the years since, not a day has passed where she wasn’t seen about town in head-to-toe Trump gear.
“Not one day in the last three years,” she said.
That positive reception gave her the confidence to open her own Trump store, called the Trump and Truth Store, in 2023, where she sold the kinds of merchandise that filled her closets.
“My whole goal is about getting people to stop being so afraid to show which side they’re on, and stand their ground a little bit,” she said. Her store has since shut down (local authorities said she violated building and sign ordinances, though she said she was being targeted by Mr. Trump’s critics).
What motivates Greg Chapman, a retired engineer who has helped his wife open three Trump stores in Alabama, Nevada and Tennessee, is being in on the joke.
“The people who come in here have a great sense of humor,” he said. “Really, that’s at the heart of it — we’ve been accused of worshipping the guy, and nothing could be further from the truth. We laugh with him.”
Others clearly want Mr. Trump’s attention.
Keyan Wilson, the owner of the Trump Store in Gatlinburg, Tenn., told Fox Business it was “a dream come true for my family to just know that Trump knows exactly who we are and where we are and what we’re doing for him” after a she held a video call with the president in her store in 2024.
Mr. Trump has embraced an expanding assortment of official merchandise. Revenue from products plastered with his mug shot, including shirts, mugs and posters, added $1.7 million to his most recent reelection campaign. In 2024, he unveiled a gilded pair of Never Surrender high-tops at a sneaker convention. They cost $399.
He has even ventured into digital merchandise, offering a speculative crypto product — known as a non-fungible token, or NFT — that he rebranded as digital trading cards. The project netted him $1.16 million.
The Size of Trump’s Personal Merchandising Income
Mr. Trump posted millions in profits from a range of products including gold watches, books and digital trading cards, according to a report this year.
The president also constantly references his Make America Great Again hats: while dining in the Rose Garden, signing orders in the Oval Office, lunching with the president of Argentina, and even while speaking at a memorial for Charlie Kirk, the assassinated conservative activist.
The Trump family is increasingly in the mix. Last year, the president prominently displayed his son’s book next to the presidential seal on Air Force One and posted on Truth Social a link to the book’s Amazon listing. His granddaughter, Kai Trump, recently promoted her new clothing line with photos taken in front of the White House.
No other sitting president has tried to make money off of the office the way Mr. Trump has, according to several ethics watchdogs. For members of Congress and many federal employees, using public office for private gain is explicitly forbidden by their codes of conduct. There are no comparable rules for the president.
But by fueling the merchandise economy, the ethics experts said, Mr. Trump has created new conflicts of interest and new incentives to leverage his public platform to bolster his own brand.
“This is so concerning not just because of how it might impact Trump’s specific decisions, but because it might suggest that public service in general is just another way to get yourself ahead and make more money,” said Daniel I. Weiner, an ethics and campaign finance expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute. “That can open the door to a sort of systemic corruption that really can, over the long term, undermine people’s faith in democracy.”
President Trump seems unperturbed by the ethics concerns. At an Oval Office event early last year, he held up a red hat with white embroidery and marveled at it.
“See that?,” he asked the room, explaining it was sent in by a fan.
In all caps, it read “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.”
“I think we should make some of them, right?”
He is not always so complimentary. His team fired off cease-and-desist letters to online merchants such as CafePress in 2015 and several Republican campaign committees in 2021 for selling unofficial Trump products. In 2024, his campaign demanded that a Republican group in Virginia stop selling products featuring Mr. Trump after the assassination attempt that summer in Butler, Pa., referring to the “bootleg Trump merchandise” as “ghoulish activity” and “in extremely poor taste.”
The Trump Organization filed a lawsuit last year against unnamed sellers based in Asia for using the word “Trump” on their merchandise. It accused them of infringing on the “Trump” trademark by offering “inferior imitations” of Mr. Trump’s official merchandise.
This year, a judge issued a default judgment in favor of the Trump team after none of the companies responded to the lawsuit, ordering the 132 largely anonymous sellers — with names like hot_years1 and Sports Fans Store — to each pay $100,000 in damages, totaling a payout of about $13.2 million.
Whether the Trump Organization will collect is uncertain.
But for a president who thrives on attention, the existence of any Trump product ends up benefitting the brand, said Raji Srinivasan, a marketing professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
“Counterfeits, unsanctioned products, licenses, products coming from Trump Org – they’re all vehicles for the core Trump brand,” she said. “It’s Teflon-coated, and this just adds more visibility to it.”
