WASHINGTON, D.C. - It’s a very particular woman’s dream job offer: hawking Make American Great Again shirts and hats outside Trump rallies, “partial nudity” required. This week, a whole lot of people discovered an old ad from a Florida porn company, seeking “Trump Honeys” to sell presidential swag to the horniest of customers throughout the campaign season. Despite the considerable outrage the ads generated, the people behind Trump Honeys aren’t affiliated with Donald Trump. They just figured, correctly, that they could make a ton of money catering to his supporters.
The call for Trump Honeys was put out by a small adult entertainment casting company called Professional Talent Services, run by a woman named Cindy Tiegs. The original version of the ad asked for “motivated ladies” with a sincere love for Trump to send photos of themselves “in your #MAGA hat, Trump shirt, American flag themed swimsuit, etc.”
The internet was very upset, assuming that the Trump Honeys were perhaps affiliated with the campaign. That’s not right; Tiegs is just an independent business owner (although she’s also a fervent Trump supporter who goes by “Deplorable Cindy” online). She told Jezebel in a brief interview yesterday via Twitter DM that she exaggerated her Trump support slightly to move merch:
My ‘support’ for Trump is sincere, but I played it to the hilt to sell shirts and hats. ! Lol. I do support him, but I am not blind to issues, I am aware of his positions and I do not have any issues that trouble my conscience.
Tiegs cooked up the business with the backing of an investor named Peter Post, relying on the labor of women who’d been mulling over appearing in porn, but were still on the fence about appearing fully nude.
“She went back to those gals,” Post told Jezebel by phone yesterday. “And said, ‘Will you put on a tight Trump t-shirt, not wear a bra, stick ‘em out and work the line?’ There’d be thousands of people on the line,” waiting to get into Trump rallies.
Post paused.
“Perhaps not the most educated or informed people,” he added, after a moment.
When they often couldn’t get inside, Post adds, “they wanted a consolation prize,” like a very, very marked-up item of clothing. They’d order hats and shirts online for $2 or $3, have them delivered by Amazon drone, and sell them for $30.
(It’s not clear what he meant, since the Amazon drone service did its first test delivery in December in the UK and is not currently available to consumers.)
Tiegs and the Trump honeys tried their business model outside Clinton and Sanders rallies early on, with markedly worse results.
“They had some moderate success early on with the Sanders campaign,” Post said. “But then it kinda waned. You reallocate your resources where you can make money.”
“Listen, some gals were making five figures a day,” Post told us. “Knapsacks filled with money. Struggling to get zipper closed. It was a capitalist venture 100 percent.” He says he invested $5,000, which he made back after two Trump rallies.
Tiegs says her business started booming after Clinton referred to Trump voters as “deplorables:”
It was “ okay” at first, but once Clinton said “ deplorable”, the crowds just grew enormously. So I owe Clinton for the a business increasing from a few hundred items per event to 10s of thousands of items. So, though she may not be aware, Clinton helped assist the Honeys :)
Now, with the campaign season ended, the Trump Honeys are also going extinct. But as a last hurrah, 200 of them headed down to Washington D.C. late Wednesday night in “rickety old school buses,” Tiegs told us, planning to sell one last round of #MAGA swag on the National Mall.
The Trump Honeys ad has since been updated to remove references to partial nudity, and to clarify they’re not affiliated with the campaign.
DISCUSSION
“Perhaps not the most educated or informed people,” he added, after a moment.
Oh, but we aren’t allowed to say that because it may hurt their feelings, and “you libruls are supposed to be sensitive to people’s feelings.”