After President Trump said that four American congresswomen should “go back to the totally broken and crime infested place from which they came,” the quartet made up of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib started fundraising as a unit via T-shirt sales. (Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley and Tlaib were all born in the U.S.; Rep. Omar became a naturalized U.S. citizen at 17 after moving to the U.S. at 10.) In this case, the partnership plays on their nickname of “The Squad.”
The T-shirts, available on the progressive fundraising platform ActBlue for $25, are simple. They’re available in either black or white, and feature the words “We Are The Squad” in a vertically stacked alignment down the side front.
— VICE (@VICE) July 17, 2019
“The Squad has never been just four people,” the item description says. “Our Squad is everyone who recognizes the cruelty and bigotry of this Administration, and is committed to advocating, legislating, and working every day for a more just and equitable world. Our squad is big.”
The president’s remarks came after the four congresswomen criticized the administration’s immigration policies, namely the conditions of the detention centers.
The “Squad,” which earned its nickname following a picture posted by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez on social media and due to their like-minded ideas, has made this fundraising item interesting for a couple of reasons. The first is that it’s truly an item for all of the congresswomen. The proceeds will be split evenly four ways. The other is that it leans into the prominent trend of creating political merchandise that doesn’t simply boost one candidate’s message in a vacuum, but does so as a direct response or rebuke to political opponents.
MarketWatch put together a tidy wrap-up of others doing this same thing.
2020 presidential hopeful Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), for example, last month started selling totes bearing the slogan “Frankly, not very polite,” based on Fox News anchor Chris Wallace’s response to her criticizing the network during a Fox-hosted town hall.
Fellow presidential contender Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), meanwhile, sells several “persist”-branded items, including a “Persist responsibly” pint glass and a “Pint-sized persister” onesie, on her website—a reference to Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) now-infamous “Nevertheless, she persisted” admonishment of Warren on the Senate floor in 2017.
Cynthia Nixon sold “Unqualified lesbian” buttons during her unsuccessful 2018 New York gubernatorial campaign after former City Council speaker Christine Quinn, a lesbian, lobbed the insult. (Nixon has resisted labeling her sexuality, and Quinn later walked back the comment.) And two years earlier, former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton plugged a “Nasty woman” shirt in support of Planned Parenthood after Trump branded her “such a nasty woman” during their third presidential debate.
On the other side of the political aisle, President Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign has started using the “Build the Wall and Crime Will Fall” line that he dropped as a slogan for merchandise. In this case, the opponent would be the elected officials whom he deems as ineffective when it comes to immigration issues or even blocking him from accomplishing what he wants.
This merchandise starts to cross over into the territory of meme-based merchandise—that is to say merchandise that relates strongly to an event tied to a particular place in time. Around here, we call it micro-moment merch. They aren’t timeless, and they can quickly become confusing after the general masses move on and the phrase is no longer part of the cultural zeitgeist.
Kamala Harris’ T-shirts she released following the first debate would fall into that category, as would Hillary Clinton’s “Nasty Woman” merchandise during the 2016 election.
Thanks to the internet, we have access to every debate, every press conference, every whim that pops into an elected offical’s head on a moment’s notice. Every piece of information is available to us at the touch of a screen or button. Because of this, political merchandise has moved beyond simple phrases like “I Like Ike” or something that fits nice and clean on a yard sign. Those are still viable options for sure. But as youth movements gain traction and grassroots movements start up as reactionary forces to political action and government policies, the more people are going to want things that relate to what they see every day. Sometimes those things are comments about another politician. Sometimes they are comments made during debates. Sometimes they are posts on social media.
The fact that we even have a nickname for “The Squad” shows how tight social media and political movements have become. The internet has changed everything else, so it’s logical to think that it’ll change political merchandise, too. I’d say it already has.
