Trump Bibles, Rudy coffee, Tucker nicotine pouches: the rightwing knick-knack racket

If you wanted to, you could smell like Donald Trump. Or you could drink coffee developed by Rudy Giuliani. You could also use a nicotine product developed by Tucker Carlson, read your children a Trump-themed book written by Mike Huckabee, take health pills hawked by Dr Oz and wear T-shirts designed by Kash Patel.

These are only a few of the products that Trump and people in his circle are selling to the American public, as Republicans and the right wing have established an unprecedented culture of grifting – hawking everything from Bibles to scraps of fabric to NFTs in a ruse that has become a multimillion-dollar micro industry.

Trump’s gold sneakers, launched in February, have brought him almost $400,000 alone. He’s also made $300,000 from selling poorly reviewed Bibles, according to financial disclosures, and has recently been pushing a “fight, fight, fight” range of colognes and perfumes.

The incoming president also sells, in no particular order: watches, guitars, boots, drinks coolers, flip-flops, candles, drinking glasses, doormats, water bottles, a “candle care kit”, slippers, corkscrews, a cheeseboard, a bottle opener, dog leashes, a “Gold Trump Serving Tray”, a “Trump Havana Wood Cigar Ashtray”, a $95 Christmas ornament, an $85 passport holder, a picnic blanket, a baseball, a $62 throw pillow and a $70 “Trump Leatherette Coaster Set”.

Others have noticed the apparent willingness of Trump’s supporters to buy almost anything, as long as it is pushed by a famous person with rightwing politics.

Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s longtime confidant, launched a range of coffee earlier this year, as he sought to claw himself out of legal debt related to his false accusations of election fraud.

“You all know I stand by the truth,” Giuliani, who last year was ordered to pay $148.1m to two Atlanta election workers after he spread lies about them, said in a video announcing the coffee.

“By supporting Rudy coffee you’re not just treating yourself to exceptional coffee, you’re also supporting our cause: the cause of truth, justice and American democracy,” Giuliani announced.

It’s unclear how a privately held coffee company plans to further the tenets of the US political system, but the claim that by buying something from a political figure, you are somehow helping a political cause or supporting rightwing culture, is a common theme.

“Our movement is awake, not woke,” reads the blurb on Tucker Carlson’s nicotine pouch website. Elsewhere, the brand adds: “Our mantra, ‘A Better Time,’ isn’t just a tagline, it’s a promise. Better products, better experiences, and a genuine commitment to a better world.”

Carlson launched the pouches after he claimed that Zyn – his previous nicotine pouch of choice – had donated to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.

In Trump’s incoming administration, there are grifters everywhere. Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, has an online clothing store called Based Apparel which, in its own words, “embrace[s] the rugged American spirit that great things are built brick by brick”.

Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who is Trump’s pick to be ambassador to Israel, is hawking a Kids Guide to President Trump book. Mehmet Oz, the television doctor who Trump has nominated to serve as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator, has drawn scrutiny for promoting herbal supplements.

Trump has clearly spawned a movement in monetizing political fame. But he’s not the first.

“It started really a long time ago in different forms, like as early as the 1950s and 60s, when there were a series of anti-communist grifters,” said Joe Conason, author of The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

“They were people that J Edgar Hoover, who was no shy anti-communist himself, referred to as ‘professional anti-communists’. They would go out on the lecture circuit and get people to give them tons of money for videos and books and lecture fees, in which they tried to convince people of the most outlandish ideas about how communists were about to take over the country, and it was going to happen within a couple of years, and [the communists] were going to execute half the population, and so on. And it was all fraudulent.”

Politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties have long sold T-shirts, mugs and assorted knick-knacks with their names and faces on them. But the step into selling things like nicotine and perfume and electric guitars is almost exclusively a Republican phenomenon, Conason said.

“It’s just much, much bigger on the right. You know, Barack Obama’s not out selling garbage to people. He would never dream of doing that,” Conason said.

“And one reason is that people on the left wouldn’t buy it. They would object, because however much people liked Obama, it’s not a cult of personality where he could order people to buy his Bible or his sneakers or something like that, and he wouldn’t do it anyway, because this is a person with a certain degree of dignity and self-respect.”

With Trump set to serve four years as president, the cashing in on political fame is unlikely to stop anytime soon, Conason said.

“The one thing that could settle it down, I guess, is if Trump actually does drive the country into a depression with his tariffs and his arresting 11 million people who do a lot of the work in this country,” Conason said.

“He could make people poor enough that they wouldn’t be able to buy the stuff any more. But otherwise, I think it’s going to go on and on and continue to grow.”