Once upon a time, Kid Rock was an official brand ambassador of Chevrolet. As part of that union, Chevy sponsored Rock’s 2014 Cheap Date summer concert tour, and in 2015 Rock designed his very own Silverado HD concept, a garish pickup truck that featured an American flag, a shit-ton of chrome, and seats patterned after acid-washed jeans.
The whole thing was going pretty swimmingly until Kid Rock came under fire last year for his continued on-stage use of the Confederate flag, and activists began lobbying Chevy to drop its support of Rock. The bowtie brand went ahead and sponsored Rock’s summer concert tour amid the controversy, but this year, Chevy appeared to relent by dropping Kid Rock as a brand ambassador this summer and replacing him with country music singer Luke Bryan.
Anyway, it appears that switching to Bryan was a good decision on Chevy’s part, because Kid Rock is celebrating Donald Trump’s surprising victory over Hillary Clinton by selling merchandise that could charitably be described as “problematic.”
Let’s take a look at this first one, which features an electoral map of the United States in 2016:
Here, all of the states that were won by Donald Trump are correctly identified as the United States of America. States won by Hillary Clinton, however, are somewhat provocatively referred to as comprising the nation of Dumbfuckistan.
Interestingly, Kid Rock’s home state of Michigan was less than 12,000 votes (0.3%) shy of seceding from the Union and joining Dumbfuckistan. What’s more, Kid Rock’s beloved Detroit seems to be infested with Dumbfuckistanian sympathizers, as less than 30% of Wayne County residents voted for Trump.
But I should tread lightly here, because pointing out such details could get me branded as a “hater,” and according to this next shirt, theirs is a fate worse than death:
One would imagine that this shirt does not reflect the values of Chevrolet, or its parent company, General Motors.
Same probably goes for this shirt:
This one is a pretty simple laundry list of things people in the United States support (and which their rival Dumbfuckistanians, one would assume, oppose).
Meanwhile, Luke Bryan is currently selling ladies’ t-shirts that say nothing more controversial than “A Double Shot of Heaven” and “Spilling Off the Top,” which is probably a source of great comfort to Chevy’s PR people.
Patrick Grieve was born in Southwestern Ohio and has lived there all of his life, with the exception of a few years spent getting a Creative Writing degree in Southeastern Ohio. He loves to take road trips, sometimes to places as distant as Northeastern or even Northwestern Ohio. Patrick also enjoys old movies, shopping at thrift stores, going to ballgames, writing about those things, and watching Law & Order reruns. He just watches the original series, though, none of the spin-offs. And also only the ones they made before Jerry Orbach died. Season five was really the peak, in his opinion. See more articles by Patrick.