Generally speaking, I appreciate the South. The pace of life, the easy sociability, and the use of the second person plural? There's something to be said for Y'all Country. But there's weirdness, too. There's the juxtaposition of faith and decadence, of extreme wealth and poverty. And, of course, the lingering racism. The Trump Store is definitely a bit of Southern Weird. We passed two of them in our travels, one in Western North Carolina and one in Tennessee, and both were just plain odd.
There they were, festooned with MAGA flags and images of the current president, looking for all the world like a far-right Spirit Halloween. I was tempted to stop and check it out as we passed, just to go in and immerse the oddness, in the same way that I enjoy now and again dining at a local restaurant run by cultists. But I didn't even suggest it to my wife, mostly because I knew she couldn't stomach the experience.
If we were still in the lead up to an election, there'd have been a sense to 'em. But we're not. Trump merch just a fixture now, a permanent and peculiar part of our I'd-buy-that-for-a-dollar zeitgeist. There's not ever been anything like this in my lifetime, this brazen embrace of politician as brand. It's the teensiest bit pornographic.
Folks know there's money to be made off of the Trump name, and American neofascism has a healthy dollop of PT Barnum profiteering woven into its flag-festooned snake-oil DNA.
At the apex of the brand, a family business makes money hand over fist, selling access and power like never before. It's not just cheaply made Bibles branded and sold for three times the going retail price. Now that they're in power, it's $TRUMPcoin, a cryptocurrency that allows the wealthy to buy into the brand and get access and favors in return. It's a $400,000,000 aircraft, offered up as a gift...not to the nation, but the president directly. It's private clubs for the oligarchs, where just getting in the door will set you back $500,000. Emoluments Shmemoluments! There's money to be made!
And at the bottom of the food chain, folks buying shirts and hats and flags wholesale, which they then hawk online and at Trump stores.
It's all just so danged crass and venal, pure 100% uncut American Mammonism injected straight into the veins of our Trump addiction.
I thought these things as I drove by, but I thought something else. Don't be a hypocrite, I thought.
I, too, have been making money off of the Trump name. I've self-pubbed a whole bunch of my manuscripts through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service over the years. Of them, only one has sold in even modest numbers. Since the election, a book I wrote back in 2022 has moved a couple of copies a day, every day. TRUMP ANTICHRIST, it's called, and it's written in the voice of Satan himself. It goes for $6.66 a copy, a low, low price selected more for symbolic value than for profit margin. Amazon gets most of that, and I get about a buck. Still, that's money.
Though I had to write the book to exorcise Trump-hatred from my soul, I've always felt a little weird about making even modest bank on it. Those royalty checks ain't a livin', but they're not nothin', either. How, I mused as we drove, am I different from that Trump Store owner?
Thankfully, Jeff Bezos has solved that problem for me.
On demand printing costs have risen, and so I recently got a message from Amazon noting a rejiggering of their royalty payment policy. Come June 10, every self-pubbed paperback on Kindle Direct Publishing that's selling for less than ten bucks will yield no royalties at all. Not one thin dime. So every penny of that Six Dollars and Sixty Six cents will go right into Amazon's pocket.
In a little under two weeks, I'll get nothing from the Great Grift at all.
It feels liberating.
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