If You Want to Know How Trump 2.0 Is Really Going, I Suggest a Visit to the Dying Trump “Superstore”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/08/trump-popularity-superstore-tennessee-dying-polls.html
If You Want to Know How Trump 2.0 Is Really Going, I Suggest a Visit to the Dying Trump “Superstore”
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Strategically placed on Interstate 40 just west of Knoxville, equidistant from two Buc-ee’s travel centers, the Tennessee Trump Superstore sits at one of the busiest trucking junctions in the state. The lot is owned by William “Bill” Hays and was, until four years ago, the home of Cupid’s Outlet, an adult novelty store managed by a trans comic that specialized in “romantic gifts & more.”
Recently, the store gained notoriety for a new sign: “Going out of business. Everything store wide 50% off.” In a viral Reddit thread on the forum r/WhitePeopleTwitter, commenters mocked the retailer’s apparent sagging fortunes with references to Donald Trump’s Jeffrey Epstein connections and business failures. “If they sold children’s clothes they would be 100% off,” one commenter noted. “Donny’s track record of bankrupting companies remains intact,” wrote another. Was this fair? A local news story claimed that the Trump Superstore owner was merely retiring and moving to Florida, not necessarily giving up on the (maybe?) still-lucrative MAGA merch business. In a Knoxville Facebook forum, commenters accused Trump critics of bad-faith attacks, for making hay out of a single 80-year-old Tennessee man’s decision to retire.
Having visited the near-empty Trump Superstore this past weekend, I can report that the notion that this store is closing merely because of a man’s retirement is “FAKE NEWS.” The truth is, the owner isn’t retiring. Trump gear just isn’t selling like it used to. Indeed, the store’s employees seem to have lost faith not just in the venture but also in the president himself.
When I arrived in the parking lot on an August Saturday afternoon, I immediately saw a pink Cadillac, a vestige of the Cupid’s Outlet. It was raining, and there were no customers. The few vehicles scattered in the parking lot, I learned, belonged mostly to Bill Hays, who describes himself as a “car guy.” In addition to the pink Cadillac, they included a yellow Volkswagen, multiple white Cadillacs, and a Brinks armored truck with a Trump sign on the side. The armored truck was on sale for “somewhere around $10,000,” Bill told me. When I asked if the pink Cadillac was for sale, he said no. “I’ve owned it for 12 years. I’m not selling it.”
To get inside the store, one follows the multiple “Open” and “Entrance” signs to the back, next to a small brick outhouse labeled “Democrat Superstore.” (Get it?) Just inside the door, there was a flimsy mannequin with the face of a much younger, slimmer Trump, wearing a red “Trump 2028” hat, a dark suit, and a signature red tie. The price tag read: “Trump statue, $2,999.00” (50 percent off, though!).
There, I met Dan, an affable middle-aged fellow with gray tufts of hair, who was bustling around with a vacuum. I asked if they were keeping busy.
“No. That’s why we’re closing,” he straightforwardly answered. “We’re not busy anymore.”
The word superstore might conjure up a shop at least the size of Walmart, if not Walmart Supercenter. But the Tennessee Trump Superstore was the size of a small house. According to Zillow, the building is 2,386 square feet, with one and a half baths. The store featured a wall of stickers, racks of T-shirts, a small table with onesies, and, in a glass case next to the cash register, an American flag lighter and a fake $100 bill with a photo of Trump in the aftermath of the Pennsylvania shooting, fist raised, blood gushing.
I examined a wall of Trump-themed hot sauce, shot glasses, bobbleheads, hats, and “Alligator Alcatraz” mugs.
“Is the owner here today?” I asked Dan.
“No,” he said.
But that was a lie. The owner was there. Bill Hays—taut, with a neatly trimmed gray horseshoe hairline—sat behind the counter and immediately clocked me as a journalist, not some casual shopper. (It was the pen and paper that gave it away.) He told me he had gotten “at least 100 calls” since the local news item announcing the impending closure. He was not particularly political, he said, and declined to even utter Trump’s name during my visit. “I have both Democrat and Republican friends,” he said, citing his experience as a general manager of a talk radio station that aired diverse views.
Bill has been involved in multiple business ventures; he reluctantly told me that these include at least one other Trump store, in Gatlinburg—another former Cupid’s Outlet—as well as condos in Florida. If a novelty sex store transforming into a Trump store wasn’t necessarily all that incongruous, there was one apparent contradiction in Bill’s business empire: The store now celebrating our most anti-trans president had been managed by a trans woman back when it was a sex shop. Bill had appointed Gishelle Gish, a trans comedian (“America’s Funniest Transsexual Comedian”), a former Tennessee radio personality, as the general manager of Cupid’s Outlet. That was before he had pivoted to Trump, though.
Dan, Bill’s current part-time employee, told me that when the Trump Superstore closure was first announced, about two weeks earlier, there had been massive crowds. “Most of the people that travel the interstate have been in here. I mean, back in the heyday or whatever, we counted—one day, we had 86 people,” he bragged. Other big days, according to Dan and Bill, included the day after Charlie Kirk was shot and after Trump bombed Iran.
When I first approached the man behind the counter, he had introduced himself as Bill, saying, “I sort of hang around.” After a brief interrogation, and contrary to Dan’s previous claims, Bill admitted involvement with the superstore. “I do own the property,” he finally confessed. I am comfortable naming him as the owner because public records confirmed this fact, even though at one point he told me he didn’t want to be identified in this story. As I peppered him with questions about the pink car and the Brinks armored truck, he remained cagey while slowly yielding information. (Yes, the truck was fully functional, but it had terrible gas mileage.) Still, Bill refused to offer his last name.
“Are you retiring?” I asked.
He laughed. “The girl that reported that did not know what she was talking about,” he said, referring to the local Knox News. “I’m not retiring, not moving down [to Florida], but we own two condos in Naples.” The whole thing had been a real pain in the butt for Bill. His friends had called; his business associates had called. People had called during a recent Icelandic vacation, for Pete’s sake. He was not moving. Let this be the final word.
“I don’t think she wanted to say we were closing for lack of business, but that’s why we’re closing,” Bill explained. Reports of his retirement had been greatly exaggerated. “Yes, I am old and I am 80, and I do own condos and other businesses,” he noted. “I don’t know why the hell she said I was 80, anyway.”
Dan chimed in on the misinformation. “It was a mess because he did have about 150 people call in the first couple of days,” he said. “That was terrible.”
Bill added, “You’re the only person I’ve ever talked to.”
It became clear as we spoke that Dan was the real talker. He was excited and cheerful and willing to share his opinions. For the store, “the first time that they tried to assassinate him was huge,” he said. “People were waiting to walk in the door,” he continued. “Everybody was going ‘Choo Choo Trump train,’ and this whole building was moving. I mean, it was just—it was unbelievable.” Dan shook his head, as if he himself couldn’t believe it, even though he had presumably been there.
“Maybe they will come back if they end the war?” I offered.
Dan eagerly pressed on. Pointing to Bill, he said, “I was just telling him that he”—by which he meant Trump—“really is dwindling, dwindling, dwindling.”
I asked Dan whether he meant dwindling in health or popularity.
“Popularity,” he replied, although he agreed that the president’s health was also an issue. “You can see more and more Republicans are not happy with their life situation,” he said. “People really are saying, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to do a full load of groceries or I’m going to put my electric bill on a credit card this month.’ ”
“He’s got opinions,” Bill muttered.
At least one of Dan’s opinions was objectively correct: Per the Economist, which has a daily tracker, only 35 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s performance.
Dan continued. “Truly, people are thinking about that, and they’re Republicans. And the big kick is if they can get off of Fox News and get some real, real news …”
All the while, Bill looked pointedly at Dan and made the universal gesture for “Cut it out,” moving his hand as if to slit his own throat. Finally, after Dan failed to get the hint, Bill cut in. “That’s his opinion. It’s got nothing to do with the store whatsoever,” he said. Bill, it seemed, did not like this conversation.
“But I’m just finishing up,” Dan protested, now deflated.
Bill shifted the discussion to other Trump-focused retailers in the area; he estimated that at least half a dozen were still in operation. “He’s Hispanic,” he said, referring to another entrepreneurial-minded individual running a Trump store. “People just see an opportunity to make their profit. … It’s all about retail.” In other words, this was not about politics, the president’s declining popularity notwithstanding.
I asked Dan if he wanted to show me some of the top-sellers. Before that, however, I picked up a greeting card, which featured a pop-up display of Donald and Melania Trump in the Oval Office. Trump’s voice rang out through the otherwise empty store. “So happy anniversary, God bless you, and God bless the United States.”
“They make everything!” Bill said to my bewildered face.
Dan took me on a short tour of the T-shirts. The most popular items, he said, were “anything MAGA related. Anything red.” Most of those were gone. But he had a few other items he wanted to show me.
First up was a short-sleeved button-up with blue stars and seashells, as well as red stripes made out of different fish. “This is a great fishing shirt,” he said. This was the new trend, he explained: red-white-and-blue attire without explicit MAGA labeling. It was more subtle, classy even.
“And then there’s some funny stuff too,” Dan explained, strutting around the store, with a sense of importance. “Let me see if I can find … do you remember the Hotel California album? Well, now it’s Hotel Mar-a-Lago.” The T-shirt had a (likely A.I.-generated) photo of Mar-a-Lago with FBI agents walking about.
As for the back of the tee: Mar-a-Lago Invasion Tour 2022.
“Those aren’t concert dates, but it’s laid out all the crap that’s happened to him. It’s laid out,” Dan said.
That crap? Russia Collusion, Obstruct Justice, Hush Money Pay, Colorado Ballot Removal, Stormy Weathers (I assume that this was meant to refer to Stormy Daniels, but was the error intentional, and if so, why?), Tax Returns, Insurrection, Misuse of Funds, and Taking Classified Docs. Across this impressive if somewhat inscrutable list was the word Canceled.
Next to it was a shirt that read MAGAville. “That’s not Margaritaville,” Dan added, helpfully. I asked about the apparent green color, which seemed incongruous with the MAGA theme. Dan informed me that the shirt wasn’t green but honeydew. “Honeydew!” he emphasized. Other products that did well included a shirt that read: “Gulf of America.” (“We are really limited on sizes,” Dan said, perhaps to mitigate my disappointment.) I ended up leaving with the Hotel Mar-a-Lago shirt, which Bill insisted I take as a souvenir of my visit, refusing my money when I pulled out my wallet.
Out in the parking lot, I hung out for some time before another car arrived, a blue Chevy Silverado with Illinois plates. I decided to wait for the customers to visit the store before I went over to talk to them. After a few minutes, a young woman walked outside; she sheepishly told me she was there only because of her mother, then climbed into the truck.
Shortly, the mother exited the store. A woman in her 50s, with close-cropped hair, she told me she drove out this way every month or so to care for her elderly father. When I asked what had brought her to the Trump Superstore, aside from the 50 percent discount, she lit a cigarette. She wasn’t a huge fan of Trump, she said, but she had wanted to buy something for her boyfriend. She showed me the sticker: The words God Guns Trump: Making America Great Again, alongside an AR-15 and, inexplicably, a bald eagle head in the corner.
“I’m a Republican,” she would repeat a few times during our conversation, just to make sure that her occasional wariness about Donald Trump himself was not misconstrued as Democratic votership. We were shortly joined by her brother, who kept a scowl on his face as we spoke.
They both asked me whether I was a Republican or Democrat. “I vote Democrat,” I told them, admitting that I had lately been disappointed in the party.
“At least he wants to keep us safe,” the woman told me of Trump. I wasn’t sure whether she meant safe from Iran or something else, but she quickly clarified that she meant “illegals.” She went on to talk about news-grabbing headlines that anti-immigrant groups have elevated for the past decade since Trump entered the public arena, almost all of which involve victims who were young white women. “No one cares about our girls getting murdered. I have daughters,” she explained. And nine out of ten times, she added in a hushed voice, “well, you know.”
“The cities are almost all illegals,” her brother added.
“I live in a Democrat state,” she said. “I already know what it is like, higher taxes.”
They got into their Silverado and went on their way.
Developers apparently wanted the land here, but Bill told me he isn’t selling this spot. “It’s not going down in value,” he explained. He was prepared to open another business, one more targeted to local clientele. What would that be? He wasn’t sure, but he was a businessman, he told me. He would figure it out. “It’s all about making money,” he said.
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