Andrea Neuser was laid up with a migraine Saturday when she heard that there had been an attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life.
She called her husband and business partner, Brad, into their bedroom to watch the news coverage. Soon, they were in tears. Then they went to work.
“My eyes were watering, and I was just trying to process all these emotions,” Neuser said. “And then I would say within processing all those emotions, it was like … this has gotta be a shirt.”
Days after Trump survived an assassin’s high-caliber bullet, photographs from the immediate aftermath of the shooting – as Secret Service agents rushed him offstage during a rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania – are unavoidable on the streets of Milwaukee outside the Republican National Convention. His bloodied face and raised fist are plastered on T-shirts, hats, pins, as well as framed art, all for sale to the faithful.
Speaking off to the side of the merchandise stand she runs with Brad and their two sons outside the security barricades surrounding the Republican National Convention site, Neuser said she was not trying “to capitalize on something so horrific,” but that the opportunity was too lucrative to pass up. The image on the shirts – the word“FEARLESS” is spelled out above the historic photograph of Trump – started on a laptop screen before moving to a printer and then an oven, where it was heat-pressed in the Neusers’ basement onto black and white Gildan tees.
By Monday afternoon, the family was posted up near a major checkpoint into the RNC grounds, where the “FEARLESS” shirts sold fast.
Christina Holbrook, who came to the RNC from her home in Cincinnati, purchased a similar shirt from another, nearby vendor.
“When Donald Trump put his fist up and mentioned ‘fight, fight, fight’ – that’s what we (in this movement) feel we need to do,” Holbrook said. “We’re in a fight for our life and in the United States at this point. So, this will sell.”
Another would-be customer, Mississippi Republican Party chair Mike Hurst, was on his way inside with his wife when he spotted the “FEARLESS” t-shirts. Hurst already purchased one online, he said, a day earlier.
The appeal, to him, was self-evident.
“After the Secret Service jumped on the president and he stood up and his response in the moment, not staged but spontaneous, throwing up a fist and saying, ‘fight, fight, fight’ – that should give every red-blooded American fired up about our country,” Hurst said.
Neuser agreed. The image, she insisted, did not glorify violence or death – only Trump and, as she described it, America’s need to set aside its divisions.
“It is putting on display how fearless and what a great leader he is,” Neuser said. “It’s probably going to be the most iconic picture ever taken due to the circumstance and who it is.”
So too, she said, was the genesis of their business.
Neuser, who lives outside Milwaukee with her family, holds a pair of degrees and works with children with autism as a registered behavior technician. But their jobs aren’t sustaining them.
After Brad worked overnight to draw up and produce the shirts, they headed to the RNC for their “last-ditch effort” to pad their income and spread an “unapologetic Christian conservative” gospel.
“It’s tremendously important that we succeed … because failure isn’t an option,” Neuser said. “I have to pay back what I put into this. And we’re struggling. I don’t think we should be struggling as much as we are.”
