If you watched former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen’s televised testimony last week, you probably weren’t thinking, “Boy, I can’t wait until there are some promotional products related to Cohen’s current stance on the president and his role in all of this.”
If you did, we advise you to play the lottery as soon as you can, because you have foresight the likes of which we’ve never seen.
If you haven’t guessed by now after reading this, there is a weird amount of Cohen-related merchandise, like mugs, T-shirts and posters celebrating his involvement in the “resistance” to Donald Trump.
The Washingtonian sums it all up pretty succinctly: “The rest of 2019 is going to be so confusing.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/BuafmFuApph/
There’s also this shirt on Redbubble:
There’s a T-shirt using the popular design of Shepherd Fairy’s Barack Obama “Hope” poster, which is an odd juxtaposition. There’s plenty more on the likes of Etsy, too, like this “MAGA: My Attorney Got Arrested” T-shirt:
If there’s a takeaway from all of this, it’s that, for some people, Cohen went from enemy to hero in one day. And he’s now a hero to the point where he’s been celebrated through tangible products can buy. The bigger takeaway, though, is that the micro-moment merch economy is alive and well. Things become memes, and memes can be monetized. These quick, fleeting pop culture moments are immortalized on T-shirts, and no doubt will become outdated, like “Frankie Says Relax” T-shirts or the Instagram Egg. (Remember that?)
It’d be odd in a couple years, even a couple months, to be walking around with a T-shirt quoting Cohen’s testimony. And really, how often are you going to use that coffee mug? How long will people catch that reference? At a certain point, the source material will be forgotten and people will just think you’re confessing to bad behavior on your own part.
But, as with anything in our e-commerce world, people are capitalizing on just about anything they can. So, since everyone’s talking about the Cohen testimony anyway, you might as well hawk a couple T-shirts if you can.
