Democrats’ “Branding Problem” Is a Literal One

I was killing time at the Washington Dulles International Airport a couple of weeks back, having arrived five hours early for my flight. (The TSA lines were actually great.) In search of a travel pillow for one of the kids, we stumbled across a gift shop in the United terminal with a surprisingly abundant array of Trump-related merch.

Garishly sequined MAGA hats. Garishly sequined MAGA sweatshirts. T-shirts, shot glasses, and sweatpants festooned with flags, bald eagles, and bold exhortations to “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.” A small, staid collection of travel pillows struggled for attention and dignity amid its gaudy neighbors. I opted for the Hudson News elsewhere in the terminal.

If Trump has had one success as a businessman and as a politician, it’s branding. Granted, his motivation has always been pure grift—hence the steaks, the shuttle, the university, the vodka, etc. When Instant Pot tried to make a MAGA-branded version without Trump’s permission (or offering him a cut), they were threatened with an infringement lawsuit. But there’s no denying the ubiquity and recognizability of the red MAGA hat. It’s the totem of the MAGA cult, the not-so-secret handshake, the mark of the true believer.

If you visit Trump’s official store, you can furnish your home with all things Trump. There’s a Trump decanter ($92), a Trump diffuser ($80, jasmine scented), a Trump candle ($55, also jasmine), and Trump coffee pods for your Keurig ($18, “gold roast,” naturally). At the Trump Town store in Boones Mill, Virginia, pilgrims can even buy “pairs of silvery, veiny metal testicles hanging from a ring and wrapped in protective clear plastic.” “That’s Trump’s balls,” the store’s owner told CNN.

Social psychology research shows that brand loyalty is powerful. Brands act as “critical cultural symbols” and as expressions of social identity, according to a 2024 article in Nature. (Are you Costco or Sam’s Club? Cubs or White Sox?) People “relate to brands in many ways similarly to how they relate to people,” finds a study from the Journal of Consumer Psychology. This means that like our human relationships, our connections with brands are visceral, emotional, and irrational.

That’s why Duke fans will be back next year, despite the team’s humiliating failure to make the Final Four. It’s also why overwhelming majorities of self-identified MAGA voters support Trump’s Iran war, despite the isolationism that MAGA purportedly represents. Democrats shouldn’t wonder why the MAGA base doesn’t budge, despite the hypocrisy and abuse Trump forces them to endure. Medicaid cuts that lead to rural hospital closures? Tariffs and sky-high gas prices? No problem. That’s the brand loyalty talking. To be one among a sea of MAGA hats is to belong to a movement bigger than yourself. The merch is tacky, expensive, and gross, but every new sale of MAGA-themed gear cements that collective identity. You might have better luck converting Yankees fans.

A sample of the tasteful wares on display in a gift shop in Dulles Airport. Photo courtesy of the author.

Democrats, on the other hand, have no competing aesthetic. If that vendor at Dulles had wanted to be an equal opportunity partisan supplier, they literally couldn’t have done it. Slogans like “Abolish ICE” and memes like “Dark Brandon” are specific to issues and campaigns—they’re not the same as an enduring brand identity for the Democratic coalition. (Nor do they have broad appeal.) The same goes for Kamala Harris’s “brat green”—a particular vile shade of lime that “Brat” artist Charli XCX said was deliberately “unfriendly and uncool.”

To the extent that Democrats and liberals have had a “brand,” it’s often been in caricatures assigned to them by their opposition. Recall the “latte liberal” stereotype coined by columnist David Brooks in a 1997 piece for The Weekly Standard. Or the “Hollywood liberal,” the “chardonnay-sipping liberal,” the “Massachusetts liberal,” the “hopey-changey liberal,” and so on.

This doesn’t mean the Democratic National Committee should turn to Madison Avenue to dream up a branding campaign. It won’t help. Democrats’ merch dearth is emblematic of its deeper problem—an inability to offer a compelling vision and a coherent set of values that can inspire a broad swath of the electorate. Meanwhile, Democrats’ failures to define what they stand for have allowed the party’s opponents to define it for them.

A salute to The Liberal Patriot. Many of us at the Monthly were devastated to learn that The Liberal Patriot has closed its doors, after five years of enlightening and provocative work. TLP was a must-read for any reform-minded progressive, and its voice will be sorely missed. We wish the best to Ruy Teixeira, John Halpin, and their team of talented colleagues.

New at the Monthly…

The most important case SCOTUS will decide this year. This Supreme Court term has already been packed with monumental decisions. Still, one upcoming case could change the course of U.S. democracy: whether to affirm birthright citizenship, or to strip it from millions of American-born children. The latter result would harken back to America’s pre-Civil War past, argues Legal Affairs Editor Garrett Epps, by creating a stateless group of people in America with indeterminate status and rights. Worse, as Garrett writes, it would “end America’s 175-year experiment with multiracial, multicultural democracy and fasten, shackle by shackle, a white ethnostate to the labor of a permanent subordinate class.” Read here.

How courtpacking could have backfired. Some Democrats frustrated by the Supreme Court’s increasing conservatism during the Biden years had floated the idea of packing the Court with more friendly nominees. It’s a good thing this effort failed, argues Politics Editor Bill Scher. Justices showed admirable independence during this week’s arguments on birthright citizenship, Bill writes, even with Trump’s glowering presence in the courtroom. Things might have been different had the Democrats’ court packing scheme succeeded. “Court packing would have required abolishing the legislative filibuster on a party-line vote, then passing legislation adding seats to the Court, and then filling those seats. If Washington Democrats had done that while holding a governing trifecta in 2021 and 2022, Trump’s Republicans would have done the same in 2025 without skipping a beat,” Bill writes. Read here.

One kernel of wheat in the chaff of OBBBA. Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” has rightly earned the heaping criticism it’s received. Its draconian cuts to SNAP and Medicaid will devastate low-income families, while its lopsided tax cuts for the least deserving (i.e., billionaires) will bankrupt America’s future. Yet Editor in Chief Paul Glastris and Editor Nate Weisberg point out one provision that could do some good: an end to federal loan funds for higher education programs that confer no economic return. The new “Do No Harm” standard, the latest in a long series of bipartisan efforts to ensure higher ed programs provide returns on public investments, would help end predatory cosmetology programs at fly-by-night beauty schools and force all colleges to keep a better eye on outcomes. “Do No Harm is a crucial beachhead in the drive to bring accountability to higher education,” Paul and Nate write. With so many Americans questioning the value of higher education, it’s a reform that champions of higher ed should embrace. Read here.

The “Orwellian” case against Anthropic. After Anthropic’s insistence on ethical safeguards for its platform Claude, the Pentagon designated the AI giant a “supply chain risk,” thereby blacklisting the firm from government business. The company recently won the first round of litigation against the Pentagon, but the case’s implications are troubling. Matt Watkins argues that the Pentagon acted not from legitimate concerns about Anthropic’s technology, but in pure retaliation for the company’s speech. It set a dangerous precedent, Matt writes, by “demanding that Anthropic deliver the Pentagon’s preferred speech as a condition of doing business.” It’s yet another brick in the construction of Trump’s authoritarian state. Read here.

Plus…

Bill Scher notes that a lot of the crimes leveled against King George in the Declaration of Independence sound an awful lot like the activities of aspiring King Donald. University of Florida Professor Allen Guelzo also takes a shot at conservative efforts to end birthright citizenship, arguing that that any effort to “lay a finger on the Fourteenth Amendment … descrecrates the amendment and the fight to end slavery.” Contributing Writer and Publisher Emeritus Markos Kounalakis writes about the important role that Voice of America once played in encouraging democracy in Iran and could have played still—had Trump not precipitously shut it down. Ukraine-based journalist Tamar Jacoby reports that even traditionally pacifist Japan is considering the purchase of Ukrainian drones as war spreads in the Middle East. Garrett Epps reviews Alan Dershowitz’s new book arguing Trump can serve a third term and finds the argument … unconvincing. Bestselling author and budget expert Mike Lofgren tells the fascinating history of the A-10 Warthog, the Gulf War-era jet that’s now pulling heavy duty again in the Middle East.

Coda (toxic masculinity edition)…

Extreme makeover, manosphere edition. It’s been hard to escape the flurry of coverage around “looksmaxxing,” a depressingly nihilistic offshoot of the “incel” world obsessed with achieving exacting standards of (white) male “beauty.” ICYMI, the avatar of this subculture is 20-year-old Braden Peters, aka “Clavicular,” who’s been the subject of recent profiles by The New York Times and The New Yorker, among other outlets, for his currently outsized presence in the manosphere (848,000 followers on TikTok, 513,000 followers on Instagram, etc.). According to the Times, Clavicular’s strategy for “ascending” includes a “stack” of daily supplements—much of it randomly imported from China—and he tells the Times he’s likely sterile, the result of taking too much testosterone beginning at age 14. Among his many obsessions is his “mid-face ratio,” derived by “dividing the distance from the pupil to the mouth by the distance between the pupils.” Clavicular and his ilk would be less worrisome if they stuck to diet, makeup, and workout tips (women have been “looksmaxxing” forever), but Peters has consorted with heinous figures like white supremacist Nick Fuentes and notorious accused trafficker Andrew Tate. Clavicular may indeed have “ascended”—as the apotheosis of the manosphere’s worst traits: shallow venality, racism, and misogyny.

Long live the patriarchy. The New Yorker reports on a three-day sleep-away camp for “alpha males”—the kind of place where looksmaxxers might go when they grow up (or at least get older). It’s run by Nick Adams, Trump’s new ambassador to Malaysia, and participants pay thousands of dollars “to crawl through mud, carry heavy objects, and, as its website puts it, ‘CHANGE YOUR STORY & UNF**K YOUR LIFE.’” This He-Man provider ethos also animates the philosophy of “biblical patriarchy,” espoused by a growing number of Christian nationalist churches. In its advocacy of total wifely submission, adherents believe “America would be better off if women could not vote,” and they advocate the repeal of the Nineteenth amendment, according to the NYT.

New York magazine, meanwhile, reports that some high-profile right-wing female influencers have finally tumbled to the fact that toxic masculinity is… toxic. “Young women drawn to the cause in recent years for more traditional reasons—religious convictions, pro-life politics, a preference for conventional gender roles—are having a rude awakening of their own, finding that MAGA sexism is not the same as the old patriarchy,” writes Sam Adler-Bell. “On the New Right, male licentiousness, violence, and domination are not only acceptable but valorized.” Um, yes, that would be right.

Btw, if any of the young men in your life have talked about “mogging,” that’s a word that’s seeped out of the looksmaxxer community and into the mainstream. It’s a short form of AMOG—“alpha male of the group”—and means “to dominate.” (E.g., “Versailles mogs Mar-a-Lago.” “Putin mogs Trump.” You get the idea.) As the elementary school math teachers who tried to co-opt “six-seven” discovered, the fastest way to kill a meme is for old people to start using it. Consider it a public service.

So if you thought this newsletter mogs, you know what to do. Have a great week!

Anne Kim, Senior Editor

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