This holiday season you can buy your own toy teddy ‘Trumpy Bear’. Buzz60’s Mercer Morrison has the story.
TRUMPY BEAR’S TWO-MINUTE commercial begins with a prophecy. A baritone voice intones it: “The wind whispered through the forest, ‘A storm is coming. You cannot defeat the storm … I fear nothing.” When the wind’s monologue concludes, the ad offers up campy endorsements of Trumpy Bear from salt-of-the-Earth archetypes: Firefighters, law enforcement officers, pizza shop employees, and a tough-looking former Marine who gives Trumpy a ride on his motorcycle.
When an ad for the “fearless, super-plush American grizzly” ran during Fox & Friends Monday morning, and Twitterati left, right, and center promptly lost their minds. They are meant to: If you’re a Trump supporter, Trumpy Bear—who sports the President’s signature blond coiffure and red tie, and is stuffed with an American flag you can pull out the back of his fuzzy neck—is a hilarious gift that is, as the commercial says, “great for all American holidays.” If you’re not, it’s the sort of stupendously baffling object that makes you wonder what aliens would think if they visited Earth today. And all that can be yours for just two payments of $19.95.
Trumpy Bear, for all his ludicrousness, is just a viral marketing stunt, another entrant into the meme-to-merch-and-back-again cycle. What makes him different from a Yanny vs Laurel T-shirt is that the product isn’t designed to capitalize on a movement, or a trendy culture moment, or even a silly joke. What Trumpy Bear is selling is the existential crisis of the Trump era.
