Reflecting long-standing social hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality, every president of the United States—until the 2008 election and the victory of Barack Obama—had been a white (as far as anyone knew), Christian (more or less), well-off, and (to all appearances) cisgender and heterosexual man. The uniformity of this public face of “the most powerful man in the world” had long served as a potent symbol of the “rightness” and seeming inevitability of the status quo. The 2016 campaign featured two especially dramatic candidates. The Republican nominee, Donald Trump, a celebrity real-estate tycoon and reality-TV star, seemed to be a hyperbolic expression of that presidential tradition and, to his ardent supporters, the essence of America itself. As one pro-Trump poster read, “I’m Voting Trump to Get My America Back.” On the Democrat side was Hillary Clinton, the former US secretary of state and First Lady, now making a historic run as the first female presidential candidate nominated by a major party. A pro-Clinton T-shirt read, “A Woman's Place Is in the White House.”

The challenges to tradition in both the 2008 and 2016 elections brought out long-standing fears, resentments, hatreds, and bigotries around race, gender, national origin, age, sexuality, religion, and class, vividly represented in (unofficial) commercial paraphernalia— bumper stickers, buttons, caps, T-shirts—many of which were then exchanged in images sent via email and posted on websites and socialmedia platforms.

The National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian, in Washington, DC, collects such paraphernalia. It deems campaign artifacts to be “material culture that represents political engagement … reflecting the infinite richness and complexity of American history.” This chapter samples and interprets a specific subset of the artifacts produced in response to the 2016 election—the vivid, vulgar, funny, angry, and often offensive and bigoted merchandise and related Internet images focused on sex and gender.