FROM Donald Trump's money-spinning mugshot on cups and plates to "Joe Biden makes me cry" bibs, 2024 United States election candidates are pushing a cornucopia of weird and wonderful merchandise to bankroll their White House dreams.
Selling campaign wares has become a multimillion-dollar cash cow for presidential hopefuls, with electoral success determined as much by the thickness of your wallet as the cut of your jib.
At the head of the bonanza, Team Trump boasted it had raised almost US$3 million in just one week after the former president's August surrender to law enforcement in Atlanta, through sales of products plastered with his arrest photo.
The Republican frontrunner, who is bidding for re-election under the shadow of multiple criminal indictments, has long been a consummate self-marketeer, having made his iconic Make America Great Again caps ubiquitous in 2016.
The 2020 election proved the most expensive in US history, and the 2024 election could well surpass it, with T-shirts, hats and buttons turning supporters into walking billboards for their favoured campaigns.
Supporters of Biden, the 80-year-old Democrat running for a second term in the Oval Office, can pick up a US$32 crop top featuring the "Dark Brandon" meme, an uber-cool online alter ego embraced by his campaign.
The history of campaign merchandise is inextricably linked to the story of American democracy itself, its creation myth the "GW" pins distributed for the election of America's founding leader George Washington in 1789.
"It starts out being handmade by supporters. People would make buttons, they would make banners," said Jon Grinspan of the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington DC.
"In the 20th century, it gets really connected to the parties, and the parties start turning out kind of silly, hokey stuff that is really tied more to the symbols of the parties like the (Republicans') elephant and a (Democratic) donkey."
Some campaigns have leaned into the creativity angle.
Who could forget the condoms Americans bought in the first two elections of the 21st century to burnish their anti-Bush credentials?
Campaigning for president is an expensive business but merchandise isn't all about the money.
In a world where viral memes are the hard currency and catchy slogans are the lingua franca, the perfectly pitched product can give any candidates an edge.
"Politics moves faster now than ever before... It's so cheap and easy to produce stuff," Peter Loge, a media and public affairs professor at George Washington University, said.
Nikki Haley, the only woman in the race for the Republican nomination, proved the point with an entire line of T-shirts, stickers and posters produced in a matter of hours after a CNN anchor said the 51 year old was past "her prime".
In the 2020 race, then-vice president Mike Pence had the misfortune to have a fly land on his head during a televised debate, and hang around while he continued to speak, oblivious to his stowaway.
The odd vignette was immediately picked up by the Biden campaign, which put out US$10 "Truth over Flies" swatters, raising US$350,000 in 24 hours.
"This is what Americans do," says Loge with a laugh. "We come up with goofy ways to monetise just about anything, including the presidency."
The writer is from the Agence France-Presse news agency