Trends come and go, but in politics, fund-raising off an opponent’s snafu never goes out of style.
Critics pounced last week when First Lady Melania Trump set off for Texas in a military-inspired $39 Zara jacket with “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” boldly printed on the back. Observers called her choice of dress for the trip—a visit with migrant kids separated from their parents at the border—everything from confusing to tone-deaf or worse.
As Trump detractors saw red, the Democratic National Committee saw a chance to make some green.
Within hours of Thursday’s dustup, the party’s online store was hawking T-shirts with a clapback aimed squarely at FLOTUS: “We Care, We Vote. Do U?” A few days later the olive-drab tees—priced at $20.18 in a nod to this year’s midterm elections—had become “by far” the best-selling DNC store item of all time, a party official told Glamour.
As of Sunday afternoon, the DNC says, visits to its online store had spiked by 2,000 percent, overall sales were up 7,700 percent, and the party had moved around 2,800 “We Care” shirts—or about $56,000 in sales. By Monday morning that was up to 3,200 shirts and more than $65,000.
The promo for the shirt is itself a jab at Team FLOTUS for insisting the jacket was, in fact, just a jacket. “When it comes to the words we put on our clothes, there is ‘no hidden message,’ We like to keep it pretty straightforward,” says the DNC site, adding that the tee is “printed on 100% preshrunk cotton—right here in the USA.”
While a spokeswoman for the First Lady said her attire wasn’t telegraphing any kind of message, the people snapping up the T-shirts want to do exactly that, according to DNC women’s media director Elizabeth Renda: The tees “are selling quickly because voters are disgusted with Trump’s shameful immigration policy and this White House’s blatant disregard for the children who they are using as bargaining chips,” she told Glamour in an email exchange.
The FLOTUS team also tried to tamp down the jacket hubbub by saying the press would do better to focus on the time she spent with kids in Texas than what she wore to get there. The President himself, however, further stirred the pot by tweeting that the message on his wife’s back was meant to show her lack of regard for the “fake news media.”
https://twitter.com/StephGrisham45/status/1009881721012150272
Asked about the DNC’s latest marketing move, Stephanie Grisham, communications director for Mrs. Trump, who on Sunday made a surprise address at a student leadership conference, told Glamour she’s “glad the First Lady has stirred up conversation through fashion, because she certainly cares about helping people.”
Grisham added via email that “while they are obviously doing this to portray her in a negative light, I hope any money the DNC is making from this will be donated to a good cause.”
The national uproar over the separating of immigrant families at the border, of course, started well before the recent tizzy over FLOTUS’ flight gear. Fueling the public and political furor: Reports describing anguished children crying for their parents and being held en masse in cages of chain-link fencing.
A CBS News poll released Sunday found 53 percent of American adults strongly opposed to breaking up parents and children trying to enter the U.S. illegally. Only 11 percent strongly favored the separations.
The poll underscores why the DNC would want to capitalize on anything that could peg the Trump Administration and its allies as callous on immigration as the GOP fights to keep control of Congress. While just over half of those polled for CBS said the family separation controversy was not changing their views on voting, 28 percent said it makes them more likely to consider backing a Democrat in November, outstripping the 19 percent who said they’d be likelier to look at a Republican.
Melania Trump—an immigrant herself—first publicly expressed dismay about the separations in a carefully worded statement on June 17. On June 20 her husband signed an executive order to keep border families together. The next day FLOTUS was off to Texas.
She was only glimpsed in the now-notorious green jacket, but that was all it took for the former model to inspire a new kind of statement piece: Brands stampeded to roll out items with a “Yes, we care” counter-message, pledging the proceeds to pro-immigrant organizations.
By Saturday Portland, Oregon–based clothier Wildfang said sales of its new “I Really Care” line had brought in more than $200,000 to benefit the migrant legal services nonprofit RAICES Texas, pointedly tweeting, “Despite what Melania thinks, people really do care.”
https://twitter.com/wearewildfang/status/1010726947142299648
That sum easily blows past what the DNC has so far raised from its FLOTUS-themed tees—and is itself totally eclipsed by the more than $20 million raised for RAICES in a California couple’s viral Facebook campaign.
While those campaigns directly benefit advocacy groups, the DNC, of course, is using its profits “to elect Democrats up and down the ticket in 2018,” Renda said—or in other words, to topple members of the party of Trump, weakening the president ahead of his 2020 reelection run.
Democrats won’t be going it alone financially this fall: Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of Trump’s hometown of New York, has vowed to spend $80 million or more of his own money to help flip control of the House.
Still, going strictly by the latest bottom lines, the Democrats may not be pooh-poohing even a small, unexpected windfall: The DNC raised $5.6 million in May, ending up with $8.7 million in cash on hand—and still, as The Washington Post noted, $5.7 million in debt. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee raised more than $14 million in May and reported $47.4 million in the bank with zero debt.
Cassie Smedile, national press secretary for the RNC, responded to a Glamour question about the DNC’s new item with an implied hat tip to the hundreds of thousands of “Make America Great Again” Trump caps sold to date: “It’s telling that the Democrat Party’s best-selling product is about bashing the First Lady, while ours is about people’s hopes that America succeeds now and in the future,” she said.
