The rise of the brick and mortar Trump store

BRADENTON – Tino Ferreira sat in a sliver of shade outside his store, watching cars go by on the Tamiami Trail and listening to Bachman-Turner Overdrive. When an SUV pulled in, he stubbed out a Marlboro red, held the door open and channeled the showmanship that runs in his blood.

“Welcome,” he said, pausing slightly for drama, “to the Trump Shop!”

Folding tables held neatly folded shirts with former President Donald Trump’s mugshot, reading “I’m voting for the convicted felon.” “Make America Great Again” hats in several variations sat near dollar bills featuring Trump as “The Terminator.”

“So you’ll have bobbleheads soon?” asked Lakewood Ranch resident Charlene Schmidt, visiting for the third time since the store opened last month. “I know they’re going to go fast.”

Brick-and-mortar Trump stores have popped up around Florida and across the U.S. in recent weeks. Others never closed. Unlikely to appear on Google Maps, they draw visitors through word of mouth, roadside signs and the power of Trump’s defiant brand — and sense of humor. One shop sells a shirt with a cartoon Trump at the wheel of a pink convertible: “Don’t worry, daddy’s on his way.”

The shops have no affiliation with Trump’s 2024 campaign and have not licensed the use of his name or image, five store operators told the Tampa Bay Times.

“Is Trump seeing any of this money?” asked Joe Ramsey from Clermont when he entered Ferreira’s store.

“No, Trump said he wants me to keep it,” joked Ferreira, 61. “So I can take care of myself and don’t have to be with a hand out to the government.”

What does the Trump campaign think of these unaffiliated stores bootlegging Trump items for profit? The campaign did not answer the question but sent a general statement saying, in part, “Florida is Trump country.”

Flags depicting a bloodied, fist-raised Trump after an assassination attempt sell well, Ferreira said. (“A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen,” Trump has said of the photo captured by the Associated Press’ Evan Vucci. The AP does not license the copyrighted photo for merch.) “Let’s go Brandon” hats, a jab at President Joe Biden, are half-off. Spend $100 and Ferreira throws one in free.

The trick, he said, lies in inventory. Trump might say something that makes a really hot item for a week. “Then it dies,” Ferreira said, “and you’re stuck with boxes of stuff.”

Ferreira, who wears a fedora and sunglasses indoors, descends from generations of circus performers who immigrated from Portugal to Sarasota. For decades, he performed a balancing act at Las Vegas casinos.

In 2016, a friend asked for his help selling merch outside Trump rallies. He’d never followed politics and only vaguely recalled voting for Bill Clinton and maybe one of the Bushes, he said, but he found the rallies fun — and saw it was good money. These days, he supports Trump and has no problem chatting with customers about the border, international trade or his perception that many politicians get into office to make money — not Trump, though.

Drive south on the Tamiami Trail and you’ll pass a flailing, inflatable tube-man Trump outside a Trump store in a Sarasota strip plaza. You’ll hit another shop in Port Charlotte owned by a Romanian general contractor who married into a circus family. He says the issue of illegal immigration made him vote Trump in 2020, shortly after he became a U.S. citizen.

In Madeira Beach, a man best known for his salvage expeditions to the Titanic recently opened a Trump store. Across the bay, another sprung up in the carnival-industry town of Gibsonton. That one is loosely affiliated with a new Trump store in Port Richey, run by a carnival vendor who has sold plastic trinkets from a pushcart at Gasparilla parades.

North on U.S. 19, you’ll reach Susan’s Trump Country in Spring Hill, open since 2016 and run by an 82-year-old retiree. A Trump merch wholesaler said a Trump shop will open soon in Clearwater, too.

Some of the merchandise is U.S.-made, operators said, while some comes from China and Taiwan.

“We’d love for it all to be made in America,” said G. Michael Harris, owner of the Madeira Beach store, “but we’d have to charge $75 for our flags instead of $20, and it’s more important to get his name out there right now.”

Why Trump stores, when no one seems to recall full-on brick-and-mortar gift shops dedicated to other political candidates?

“He was a celebrity before social media. When I was growing up, he was building skyscrapers, dating supermodels and driving around in a limo,” said Harris, 60. “How about The Apprentice? Everyone loved Trump. Why is he on a T-shirt? It’s like, well why was Farrah Fawcett on a poster?”

Derek Allen supplies vendors around the country and once owned dozens of Trump stores, mostly in Minnesota. Now he helps people open their own. His Trump wholesale business and warehouse is headquartered at the same Gibsonton address as his Showtime Novelties, which provides the toys you might win for a ring toss at the state fair.

There’s a big overlap, Allen said, between the Trump merch business and carnival and events vendors. It’s an industry of people who know how to set up shop in a new town, source novelty merchandise and move product fast before rolling on to the next hot thing. He sold more than a million dollars worth of fidget spinners, he said, and he’ll transition his Michigan Trump stores to Detroit Lions gear if the team is a Super Bowl contender.

And while Allen said he supports Trump’s run completely, he’d have no qualms selling shirts featuring, say, Vice President Kamala Harris. “I’m a capitalist,” he said.

He tested the waters, he said, by sending a vendor to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago but said the unlicensed Harris merch wasn’t selling well enough to expand.

“Bernie, Hillary, we sold some of that stuff, but Trump stuff outsold them five to one or more,” Allen said, chalking it up to charisma. “If the Democrats made the Rock the nominee, we’d sell a lot, absolutely.”

Other reports said independent Harris merch sales boomed at the DNC, and the Harris-Walz campaign said it had raised $3.3 million by selling more than 82,000 of its official camo hats.

There remains a passionate sense of group identity around the MAGA movement that has Trump supporters eager to wear his name.

“It’s because we don’t think of this as a campaign,” said Lawrence Speiser, a retiree from Buffalo, shopping for Trump shirts in Bradenton. “It’s a movement.”

The campaign’s approach to bootleg merch has been mixed. In Tennessee, the Washington Post reported that campaign officials threatened to sue a county Republican Party for selling certain shirts with Trump’s image.

When official GOP committees and local candidates use Trump’s name or face to sell merch, they must donate a percentage to his national committee, according to a campaign memo. But it doesn’t mention independent entrepreneurs like Allen.

Allen said he chips in with a small percentage of profits, anyway, and in his experience, Trump’s circle has gotten more lax about crackdowns.

Either way, the stores serve as an impromptu gathering space for supporters.

In Port Richey, shop operator Chad Bowles, 50, chatted with Peter and Marisa Antonello about how they like Trump’s brash “New York attitude” because he’s able to intimidate China and Russia.

A customer came in looking for Trump towels, which Bowles didn’t have. He does have a size 10 pair of Trump sneakers for $300.

Bowles had run off to join the circus as a teenager, then operated carnival rides until he found his way to selling novelty items. “I’ve never voted,” he said, “but I’m going to vote this year.”

In Madeira Beach, where customers discussed what they saw as harm in diversity, equity and inclusion programs in hiring, much of the product line is as devoted to owning the libs as it is to promoting Trump.

“This is $5 million Trump Bucks, good at any Starbucks,” said owner G. Michael Harris to a guy buying a magnet of Biden dressed as Chef Boyardee. He passed the man a novelty bill with Trump’s face. “You hand this to the liberal behind the counter, and when their head explodes, you walk out with your coffee.”

Harris also hands out cards with a QR code to donate to the campaign.

All five store operators said they were turning a profit, though they declined to provide figures. In the hour a reporter spent at the Bradenton shop, five customers spent a total of $320.

“The Trump business, it’s feeding some families, let’s just say that,” said Bowles, in Port Richey.

Allen, the wholesaler, said sales now lag behind 2020, when business soared amid backlash to the protests following George Floyd’s murder. Still, “If you put in $15,000, it will bring back $40,000 easily.”

The hardest part, he said, is finding an affordable storefront.

Most of the local stores opened in well-worn spaces amid suburban sprawl. In Madeira Beach, water dripped from the ceiling onto the owner’s desk.

Ferreira searched for weeks for a place in Tampa or St. Pete. Before he moved into his Bradenton space, it housed an illegal slot machine parlor and barbershop. Ferreira rings people up while sitting in a barber chair, beneath a flag reading, “Trump won. I know it. You know it.”

Ioan Dumitresu, in Port Charlotte, said his shop doesn’t need traditional advertising. After opening, he got into a big argument in a Facebook group with someone mad about the store’s existence. The post went a bit viral around town. Dumitresu said he did $5,000 in sales the next day.