r/esist

Trump has launched 622 products since start of second term — and made $8.8 million in one year

Sleaze, just plain sleaze!

He hasn’t appeared on late-night TV hawking his cheap crap yet, maybe when he finally stops his delusional texting he’ll stand before us holding a box of ‘Trump’s all-day diapers’, and because he has the mouth of a back alley wino he’ll say something like, “When you are as full of shit as I am, you need these. No need to constantly change them, they expand as you use them, so one pair will hold out ‘til JD Vance changes them.

Or “Try Trump’s ‘Silly Pills’. When your fantasies fill your head and you start drooling like a basset hound, these happy buggers will make you feel like you’re back on Epstein Island with a golf cart full of third graders”

A disgrace, but the bigger disgrace is there are Americans who think this man-child’s childish antics are a fit representation of American values and traditions.

See this – Boldface mine:

 

Trump has launched 622 products since start of second term — and made $8.8 million in one year

Story by Averee Nelson

It’s no secret that President Donald Trump has an affinity for entrepreneurial personal branding, as seen in the Trum Store.

In 2017, the Trump Organization launched an official retail website, TrumpStore. com, which sells Trump-branded merchandise, from the president’s famous “Make America Great Again” hats to T-shirts, glassware, and more.

While Trump's two older sons, Eric and Donald Jr., are listed as the leaders at the helm of the Trump Organization, it is still owned by the president. A new report found that the Trump Store continues to release hundreds of products as Trump is in his second term in the White House — and he’s making an impressive profit from the merch. The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) — a nonpartisan nonprofit government watchdog organization — released a new analysis last month, finding that the Trump Store has launched at least 622 products since the start of Trump’s second term in office, totaling $43,000.

“This is an unprecedented level of monetization of the presidency, even by the standards of Trump’s own first term,” the analysis detailed.

The site sells a range of products at various price points, with a men’s “Mar-a-Lago Mock Neck Pullover” listed for $265, a classic red “45-47 MAGA Hat” listed for $55, and a “MAGA Flag Pickleball Paddle” priced at $180.

CREW, citing Trump’s last released financial records, found that the Trump Store brought in approximately $8.8 million in 2024. This is more than double what the store made in 2023 and more than 17 times more than the amount made in its full year of operation, proving how lucrative Trump-branded merch has been.

According to the CREW analysis, if a supporter wanted to purchase every in-stock item from the Trump Store right now, it would cost $91,145.12 for the 1,492 items. At least 99 of those items directly reference the presidency, costing $7,511.28.

 

The Trump Store has drawn criticism since its launch in 2017, as CREW has pointed out that Trump is profiting from his presidency regarding the products referencing his political position. Trump ranks #673 on Forbes' list of today's top 3,400 billionaires, with a net worth of $6.1 billion.

The store even sells products that reference an unconstitutional third presidential term for Trump, such as a “Four More Years!” hat, “Trump 2028” merch, and a “Trump 2028 (Rewrite the Rules)” T-shirt.

Trump has brought personal branding to the White House

As reported by the New York Times, Trump used the Oval Office study to display Trump-branded merchandise, from hats, signed water bottles, and more. The merch room includes some of the hats referencing Trump running for a third term.

This room sparked conversation on social media after footage of Trump showing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and French President Emmanuel Macron the merch room went viral in August 2025.

Some of the hats in the room, emblazoned with various slogans, are available for purchase on Trump’s merchandise website.

When the Trump Store was launched, Larry Noble, general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center, told NPR in 2017, "It fits again into the larger problem of him basically promoting his businesses from the White House.”

He continued, "We haven't had another situation where a president has had a website where his business is selling things that are branded with his name."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-has-launched-622-products-since-start-of-second-term-and-made-8-8-million-in-one-year/ar-AA23FqHG?

 

Robert F Kennedy Jr, who never heard of a disease he couldn’t deny existed or a vaccine he didn’t think caused autism, gave the same reply about Ebola and Hantavirus as Trump did when asked (for the hundredth time) about Covid, ‘Don’t worry, we’re working on it.’

And then a million Americans died.

Bobby also said, ‘We have it under control.

Ebola, the most dangerous virus on earth, with a mortality rate of almost 100% and is again threatening the world has finally met its match; Bobby, has it under control.

He made no mention if the government was working on a vaccine, or is developing a wonder drug, or he has a sure-fire method of containment. True, he made no mention of Ivermectin, Alka Seltzer, or Ben Gay either, but you can bet they are all in the mix.

He said Hantavirus is under control, too. Again, he made no comment about treatment, or containment – no mention of incantations in a thatched hut, burying black cats at midnight, naked dances around a campfire or other quaint household remedies – but he has it ‘under control’, or is ‘working on it’, or…?

I’m sure he’ll do the right thing. After all, Trump picked him. But ‘til then, I’ll hold my breath.

See this – Boldface mine:

 

'We’re working on it': Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. on Ebola, hantavirus response

Story by Arthur Jones II •

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told ABC News on Monday that his agency is working to address the recent hantavirus and Ebola outbreaks, marking the first time he’s commented publicly on the Ebola outbreak since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed than an American had been infected with the virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

“Yeah, we’re working on it,” Kennedy told ABC News when asked if he was worried about the outbreaks. The secretary’s comments come after the CDC said a “small number of Americans" are directly affected by the current Ebola outbreak in the DRC.

Kennedy did not respond when asked what his message might be to Americans who are concerned about the diseases potentially spreading in America. He told reporters in the Oval Office last week that the U.S. had the hantavirus outbreak “under control.”

“We have this under control and we're not worried about it,” he said at the White House’s maternal healthcare event on May 11th. Kennedy also noted that the CDC has been working on the outbreak since day one.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/we-re-working-on-it-secretary-robert-f-kennedy-jr-on-ebola-hantavirus-response/ar-AA23yWPT?

>"Prediction markets analysts told 60 Minutes Sunday that insider trading on U.S. military conflicts is exploding, and that the soldier accused of trading on the U.S. invasion of Venezuela was merely a small fish in a very large pond."

The Republican policy proposal, ‘Saving America by Saving the Family’, is akin to anything the Nazis proposed, and goes a lot further.

This White Nationalist, White Supremacist, whacko religionist fanaticism will control every aspect of American life, and if you disobey you will pay the price.

The price? Nazis didn’t think murder as too extreme!

Red-eyed zealots, filled with hatred and disdain for American ideals and traditions have subsumed the GOP, turning it into a fascist dictatorship who will rule with an iron hand and brook no dissent.

They have already taken away most of our healthcare and social services, this latest legislation will remove the rest.

See this – Boldface mine:

 

How Republicans plan to rig the vote — and make it stick | Opinion

Opinion by Thom Hartmann •

© provided by AlterNet

The same outfit that wrote Project 2025 and watched the Trump administration follow its playbook virtually to the letter has been busy assembling a 90-page tract called “Saving America by Saving the Family.”

It maps out a future in which American women are stripped of their right to vote without their husbands’ paperwork, denied access to contraception and abortion, pushed back into the home, and reduced to what Heritage’s new American Citizenship chair Scott Yenor calls the “heroic feminine” of motherhood and wifeliness. It’s quite a Mother’s Day card from the people who claim to revere motherhood the most.

Scott Yenor wants:

— To make gay sex illegal in America again,— Divorce to be “difficult to get or proscribed,”

— Adultery and sex between unmarried consenting adults criminalized, and

— The Civil Rights Act to be “scaled back” so that businesses, schools, and “every other institution in the country” can once again discriminate against women, queer people, and minorities the way they used to.

And just a few months ago, the Heritage Foundation, the same outfit that wrote Project 2025 and watched the Trump administration follow their playbook virtually to the letter, hired Yenor to chair its American Citizenship Initiative.

When pressed about Yenor’s record, reported in detail by The Guardian and LGBTQ Nation, Heritage didn’t quietly walk anything back. They instead invoked their “One Voice” doctrine, which means that what one Heritage staffer says is what the institution stands for, and they loudly stood by him.

Even some of the foundation’s allies winced publicly to The Atlantic, but Heritage reportedly didn’t budge. This is what billionaire-funded Christian nationalism looks like in 2026, and it’s been the project, almost without interruption, ever since the Reagan Revolution

Most Americans don’t know how the Heritage Foundation came to exist; I’ve been telling this story on the radio for more than two decades because it matters. In 1971, a tobacco lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce arguing that the American “free enterprise system” was under attack from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”

His prescription was that corporate America needed to fund its own intellectual infrastructure, think tanks and university programs, legal centers, and media outlets that would shift the country’s political center hard to the right and protect billionaire wealth from democratic accountability.

Two months after writing that memo, Nixon nominated Powell to the Supreme Court.

In 1973, beer baron Joseph Coors read the Powell Memo, decided American business was “ignoring a crisis,” and wrote a $250,000 check to launch the Heritage Foundation alongside Paul Weyrich, the man who later coined the phrase “Moral Majority” and famously told a room of 1980 evangelical leaders that conservatives don’t actually want everyone to vote because “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Heritage was, from day one, a vehicle for translating Powell’s memo into operational policy, and that founding circle of donors, Coors plus Bradley plus Olin plus Scaife plus Koch, never really left.

According to a DeSmog analysis of Project 2025’s funders, six billionaire family foundations bankrolled Heritage’s blueprint for the second Trump administration: Bradley, Coors, Koch, Mellon, Seid, and Uihlein.

‘They may have really overshot this’: How redistricting could backfire on GOP

That's always a ratings winner.

Same families, same project, more than half a century of the same handful of fortunes funding the same grinding assault on democracy, women’s rights, civil rights, and any policy that would tax great wealth or restrain corporate power.

What’s new is how openly they’re saying the quiet parts now.

Heritage’s 90-page tract “Saving America by Saving the Family,” the subject of a thorough investigation by Billie Jean Sweeney for Important Context, lays out a vision that overturns marriage equality, denies the existence of trans people, eliminates no-fault divorce, and uses federal Medicaid dollars as a weapon against any state that disagrees.

The document opens with the sentence “The Founding Fathers were, quite literally, fathers,” which gives you a pretty clear sense of where they’re going. They’ve invented a problem they call a “birth dearth” and identified the culprits: women being educated, women working outside the home, women using contraception, women existing as autonomous people.

As Mehmet Oz, Trump’s administrator for Medicare and Medicaid, said recently, “One in three Americans is under-babied.” White Americans, of course.

Anybody who’s read 1930s European history will recognize what’s going on here.

The Nazi regime’s Mutterkreuz, the “Cross of Honor of the German Mother,” handed out medals to Aryan women who produced four or more children while sterilizing those it considered unfit, and the Lebensborn program ran maternity homes designed to manufacture “racially valuable” babies for the Reich.

Heritage isn’t there yet, but the ideological architecture is the same: women as reproductive vessels for a state-defined ideal, with the full weight of federal policy bent toward forcing them into that role.

Civil rights attorney Michelle Uzeta, who runs the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, told reporters the through-line is “government-sponsored devaluation of entire communities, informed by eugenic thinking,” and that’s not hyperbole, that’s what the documents say when you read them carefully.

The operational arm at HHS is staffed accordingly. Russell Vought, Trump’s OMB director and a self-described Christian nationalist who co-authored Project 2025, has spoken with revulsion of “the transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions.”

Calley Means, a former Heritage research analyst, is now senior White House advisor at HHS. His sister Casey Means, whose surgeon general nomination Trump just withdrew on April 30 after Senator Bill Cassidy refused to support her, told Tucker Carlson that birth control “shuts down” a woman’s “life-giving nature,” and Trump immediately replaced her with another vaccine-skeptical Fox News contributor, radiologist Nicole Saphier.

Natalie Dodson, a named Project 2025 contributor, runs the Office of Population Affairs that decides Title X family planning rules, and the first Trump-era domestic gag rule, in effect from 2019 to 2021, forced 981 clinics out of the program and cut the network’s patient capacity in half, leaving six states with no Title X provider at all. The current administration has signaled it will repropose the gag rule, and Trump’s 2026 budget proposes eliminating Title X entirely. The most useful place to watch how the playbook actually operates on the ground is Missouri.

Voters there passed a constitutional amendment in November 2024 protecting abortion rights with 52 percent of the vote, and the Republican-controlled legislature simply ignored them and referred a counter-amendment to this November’s ballot that would repeal the protections voters just enshrined.

To boost their odds, they bundled in a permanent ban on gender-affirming care for trans minors, even though Missouri law already bans that care. It’s pure ballot candy, bolted onto an abortion ban specifically because polling shows the trans-care provision boosts support for the abortion ban among voters who otherwise wouldn’t go along.

Divide and conquer, in other words, weaponized at the ballot box to overturn the explicit will of the voters.

This is what I wrote about in The Last American President: the slow, methodical, billionaire-funded conversion of American constitutional democracy into something that more closely resembles a “Christian” white supremacist oligarchy with a theocratic veneer.

The people running this project are not hiding it anymore. Yenor isn’t hiding it, Vought isn’t hiding it, and Heritage’s “Saving the Family” tract isn’t hiding it either.

They’re telling us, in their own words, that they want to recriminalize gay sex, eliminate no-fault divorce, force women back into the home, gut the Civil Rights Act, and use federal funding as a chokehold on any state that resists.

And while Heritage and its think-tank allies map out the cultural policy, their allies in Congress are working to rig the franchise itself so that the populations most opposed to all of this can’t actually vote any of it down.

The SAVE Act, which Republicans in the House passed in expanded form on February 11 as the SAVE America Act, would require every American to produce documentary proof of citizenship in person at an election office in order to register or re-register to vote.

The Brennan Center estimates that more than 21 million eligible American citizens lack ready access to those documents, and the League of Women Voters puts the number of American women whose paperwork doesn’t match their current married name at 69 million, all of whom would suddenly need to dig up a birth certificate, a marriage license, proof of a legal name change, and matching photo ID just to vote. Trans Americans, naturalized citizens, older Black Americans born in the pre-civil-rights South who were never issued birth certificates in the first place, college students, military families stationed overseas, rural voters who’d have to drive hours to a county office, and the millions of working-class citizens who simply can’t afford a passport would face the same wall.

Senator Mike Lee of Utah, one of the bill’s chief Senate champions, has publicly tied its passage to Republican prospects in the 2026 midterms, which is about as close as a politician gets to admitting on the record that the entire point of the bill is to keep women, trans people, young voters, and Americans of color away from the polls so the Heritage agenda doesn’t get voted down by the majorities that consistently oppose it.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-republicans-plan-to-rig-the-vote-and-make-it-stick-opinion/ar-AA23oRRR?

For anyone interested in attending, free rides are available from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee.