It’s a perfect late-summer day, and Bill Massry’s carrying an armload of hoodies down the main drag of Lake George, New York, from one of his stores to another. Massry owns three storefronts on Canada Street in this upstate tourist village. They all share the same name: Dilligaf.
“Dilligaf is meant to be for the lighthearted souls,” Massry says to me. “It wasn’t supposed to be political.” When he gets going, Massry can talk for half an hour straight, no problem. If he wants to emphasize a particular idea, he reaches out a muscular arm and, surprisingly gently, grips your shoulder.
Now he grips mine and points down the street. “You see this guy, wearing one of my shirts? That’s one of my bestsellers.” The guy looks to be in his 50s and is wearing an army-green long-sleeve with an image of the American flag on the front, WE THE PEOPLE crawling down both arms. He’s eating an ice cream cone.
Massry keeps going: “I’ve voted Dem. I’ve voted Republican. I’m not one way or another. But my customer base is very Republican. D’you know what I mean?”
“In here,” he motions as we step into one of his stores, packed to the rafters with profane, in-your-face right-wing merch. “They want the Second Amendment; I want the Second Amendment. They want Trump; I want Trump. I do recognize he can be very abrasive.”
A customer enters the store and Massry turns to him. He’s got a spiel he does every time. “Sir, do you know what Dilligaf stands for?”
“I don’t think so,” says the customer, another guy in his 50s.
“Does it,” Massry prompts, with a twinkle in his eye. “Look like … I …”
“Give a fuck!” the man finishes triumphantly.
“You know it!” He turns back to me. “I never say fuck until the customer says fuck. I don’t want to offend little Bobby Jr., a grandmother, or a customer that’s religious. I’m very, very, very respectful. I grew up respecting people. I’m not a Republican or a Democrat. I’m a capitalist.”
He points to a sticker pasted to the sales counter: It depicts Trump kneeling in prayer, next to an American flag and Jesus with his crown of thorns. “We made this design, with Jesus and Trump. It sold nothing. Nothing! We were gonna throw 500 of these stickers away. Until he got shot. Now people come in here, they say, ‘Jesus saved him!’ OK, whatever, you sound like an idiot. But they buy these.”
If you’ve driven any distance across America over the past decade or so, you’ve likely seen a type of brick-and-mortar business that’s holding strong against the e-commerce revolution: the Trump Shit store. On rural highways, in small resort towns like Lake George, and even in the tourist mecca of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, Trump Shit stores sell T-shirts, hats, stickers, beer koozies, and Croc Jibbitz featuring the once and maybe-future president’s likeness. They seem to spring from the earth fully formed, their T-shirts reading I’M VOTING FOR THE FELON waving in the breeze. There’s no central organization representing these grassroots retail establishments, and no count of how many there are. But they are an undeniable micro-economy that has now thrived for nearly a decade—and they hope to for, say, at least four more years.
The Trump Shit store is ground zero for the fervent loyalty Trump inspires in his subjects. So when I heard that in this modest vacation destination, three separate storefronts on Canada Street now feature unhinged Trump products under the brand name “Dilligaf,” I needed to understand: Who is shopping at these stores? What draws them there? And who is making, and selling, all this Trump shit?
When he was a young man, Bill Massry wanted to be an actor, but he wanted money more. He moved to Florida from New York and sold municipal bonds. “Then I got fired,” he said. “I got fired from every job I had after college. I even got fired from a volunteer job at the Lipton Championship,” as the Miami Open tennis tournament was then called. “I think I was just born to be an entrepreneur.”
In the early 1990s, Massry, fresh off another firing, came back north to Lake George and took over his parents’ souvenir store, then called the Mushroom Tree, with his brother Norman. Norman had just returned from Desert Storm, service for which he would be awarded a Bronze Star, and together they renamed the store Stormin’ Norman’s. “He hated it,” Massry said of his brother. “He said it was the most brain-dead job in the world.”
After a few years, Norman left for law school. Massry stuck with it, spending winters in Florida, where his wife is a real estate agent. He was sick of Stormin’ Norman’s, though, and wanted his own brand, something that really spoke to who he was. He remembered a guy he’d met years before who wore a pin asking if it looked like he gave a fuck.
“That’s me—that’s really me,” he thought. “One night I typed in these eight letters, and I played with fonts, and I came up with a design.” He offered his employees a 50-cent bonus each time they sold the Dilligaf branded stuff alongside Lake George T-shirts and Yankees hats. He rebranded himself, going by “Bohica Bill.” (Bohica is a dark military joke: bend over, here it comes again.) More than 15 years ago, he renamed the store Dilligaf, by Bohica Bill.
Bill Massry. Dan Kois
He found he had a certain kind of customer—someone from Long Island or Jersey, a little more upscale than the working-class tourists his dad used to sell to, a little more downscale than his wife’s real-estate friends in Miami—who loved the most outrageous T-shirts he could print. Maybe they bought them, maybe they didn’t, but they loved pointing at them and reading them out loud:
I’D RATHER BE SNORTING COCAINE OFF A HOOKER’S ASS
MY BOSS IS A FUCKIN ASSHOLE!
I SUCK! CLITS, TITS & BONGHITS!
Massry hung his wildest designs in the front windows, a lure to get people into the store. That’s when the trouble started. “I thought they were gonna crucify me!” said Massry. “Like Jesus here.”
It turned out a lot of people in Lake George did give a fuck—and that was before Massry’s turn to Donald Trump, who turned out to be the perfect embodiment of his merchandise, his world view, his brand. Massry says he still doesn’t GAF all these years later. By the time I left Lake George, I wasn’t so sure.
Dan Kois
“The problem is, any type of publicity Billy gets, he lets us know it helps him,” Bob Blais told me. The former mayor of Lake George is well over 6 feet tall, with an open, friendly face. When he finally stepped down in 2023, Blais was the longest-tenured mayor in America, having served the village for 52 years. In many ways, he accomplished a lot: He managed Lake George’s transformation from a gaudy, neon-lit midcentury tourist trap to a modern family destination whose natural beauty draws 6 million visitors each summer. On the other hand, he never managed to shut down Dilligaf.
“Parking meters, the beach being closed,” he said, “the letters about Billy’s stores each summer outnumbered, by far, all the complaints we would receive on everything else.” Blais always calls Massry “Billy,” a not-so-subtle reminder that he knew Massry when he was a kid working in his dad’s store. Each spring, Blais would send a letter to Massry, asking him to please take down the most offensive shirts in his window displays. Each spring, Massry would ignore him. And each time Blais tried to address the problem, it seemed to backfire.
As long ago as 2007, the local newspaper was writing about Blais’ battles with Massry. By 2013, a columnist in the Albany Times Union was wryly noting that “every summer,” some newspaper or TV station was covering the debate, given that reporters “are quite happy to spend a summer day in Lake George.” (Guilty!)
In 2015, the village proposed an obscenity law regarding merchandise in store windows. “So what did I do?” Massry asked. “What do you do when you have a problem in America? You hire an attorney.” His wife was friendly with David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer, and he recommended his longtime lawyer, Cameron Stracher.
“Look, there isn’t a lot of legal support permitting towns to restrict the type of imagery and words that can appear in privately owned businesses,” Stracher told me. (I’ve known Stracher for decades, since he worked with my wife, also a First Amendment lawyer.) Maybe, he said, if Massry took a photo of people having sex and put it on a shirt, that might violate obscenity laws, “but curse words won’t do it.” When Stracher sent a letter explaining this, the village hired an attorney, who told Blais the same thing. “Don’t bother,” the lawyer said. “You won’t win.” The village withdrew the proposal.
In 2018, Massry placed a billboard on Route 9 advertising his store. “Does It Look Like I Give a …” the billboard said, coyly. “You cannot imagine the free press that I got,” he told me. When the billboard came down amid complaints from locals, that created even more press. “So I was just like, fuck it. If I want free advertising, I just gotta piss these people off.” He loaded his store’s windows with more vulgar T-shirts, including one that said FUCK YOU BOB. (“Everyone knows a Bob,” Massry said.)
“I never had a fight with him,” Blais said. “I never yelled at him. We always shook hands every time he came into my office. And then, the next thing you’d know, I’d look at the news, and there would be Billy, standing in front of his T-shirts.” Blais noted that Massry has never joined the Chamber of Commerce (“a bunch of fucking deadbeats,” per Massry) and rarely participates in community activities. “Billy is not a community-oriented person, and he wasn’t very well-liked in the community at all because of that.”
“I love Lake George,” Massry said. “I love it. It’s gorgeous. I mean, I don’t like the small-minded people that live here. Narrow-minded, narrow boys’ club. I always thought they were against me. Because I’m not part of the group. Secondly, I’m Jewish.”
In 2023, Blais’ final year in office, he took one last shot at getting Dilligaf to fall in line. The village proposed an ordinance requiring businesses on Canada Street to leave their windows clear of merchandise, so that customers can see through to the store inside. Such cluttered displays, Blais wrote in his annual town newsletter, “ruin the aesthetics of our business district and just simply look ‘bad’ and unprofessional.”
Massry knew who he was really talking about. “Another Bill Massry ordinance,” he said. Again he hired Stracher, who again wrote a letter explaining the many reasons such an ordinance would be unconstitutional. “And you know what? It shut the fucking village down. I don’t mean to swear, but it shut them down hard.”
“I think Billy is a fine, industrious, hardworking young man,” Blais told me. (Billy is 58.) “But I think his presence, in a resort community that caters primarily to middle-class families—he’s out of step with what we’re trying to do.”
“Did you ever see the movie Private Parts?” Massry asked me. In that Howard Stern biopic, Stern is driven to greater and greater heights of bad behavior by his irritating station manager Pig Vomit, played by Paul Giamatti. “D’you understand, my mayor, Bob Blais, Robert Blais, B-L-A-S-S or whatever the hell it is—he was my Pig Vomit. He motivated me to go, ‘Fuck you!’ D’you understand?”
Despite the standee outside Dilligaf reading THE TRUMPINATOR, and despite the Trump flags in the doorway, and the T-shirt featuring a gangsta Trump grinning with solid-gold grills, and the T-shirt that reads TRUMP REVENGE TOUR 2024, and the poster of a defiant Trump, bloodied but unbowed, holding his fist up after being shot—despite all these, I eventually discovered Dilligaf isn’t really a Trump Shit store. Not exactly.
You would have had to be a moron, Massry said, not to notice that Trump merchandise gets major attention. “But I don’t want to carry Trump shit that other people carry,” he said. “I make my own Trump shit. It has to have an edge to it.” Not for him simple MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN merch. No, his Trump merch says, TRUMP: FINALLY SOMEONE WITH BALLS. Or features Trump wearing a Punisher shirt, or a do-rag. Or Trump flipping double birds, ear bandaged, gloating YOU MISSED. Sure, he has some generic stuff—“Trump flags, whatever, I buy them off Amazon for five dollars to sell for $19.95. I mean, you can’t get any stupider than that. D’you understand?”—but for the most part, it seems, his Trump merchandise is there as much to communicate the store’s ethos as it is to be sold.
While visiting Lake George, I saw countless tourists stop in front of a Dilligaf store after they noticed all the Trump shit around the entrance. They pointed and laughed and read the slogans out loud, elbowing one another. Then they entered the store, which contains almost entirely non-Trump items, and bought Dilligaf hoodies, Lake George swimsuits, “Hawk Tuah” T-shirts, and onesies reading I LOVE MOMMY & DADDY BUT MY NANA & PAPA ARE THE BEST!
Plenty of the T-shirts at Dilligaf express far-right sentiments without being specifically about Trump, and those are popular, too. They’re notably mean-spirited and, often, comically wordy, in the way of those T-shirts featuring scrolls of indignant text down someone’s back, often printed in Impact, the meme font.
YOU ARE ENTITLED TO YOUR OPINION
YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED
TO TELL ME WHAT
MINE MUST BE
IF I HAD
TO CHOOSE
BETWEEN
FREEDOM OF
SPEECH AND
MY GUN
I’D
CHOOSE MY
GUN (AND THEN
SAY WHATEVER I WANT
BECAUSE I HAVE A GUN)
The operating principle behind most of Bohica Bill’s T-shirts, political or apolitical, is simple: They are shirts that say to the world, “I’m an asshole.” Who but an asshole would wear a T-shirt that proclaims he just came here to get his dick sucked? Who would buy a T-shirt featuring a single bullet, its tip painted red, and the slogan JUST THE TIP, but an asshole? Who on earth would want to display a shirt reading, “You’re into pronouns huh? Me too. Let me she/them titties” but a true connoisseur of anti-woke doofery, a devotee of the art of being a dickhead? “Get a CONDOM for your heart,” one T-shirt reads. “I’m about to FUCK your feelings.”
And so the Trump merch at Dilligaf, despite representing only a fraction of Massry’s sales, serves a crucial purpose. It is a sort of Bat-Signal for assholes. It attracts trolls as a flame does a moth, lures them inside, and sets them loose in an environment full of products that will tickle them. Maybe they’ll buy the trolliest stuff, or maybe they’ll just buy a We the People shirt. But Donald Trump’s smirking face tells them, instantly, that here, at least, is a safe space to be who they really are.
Dan Kois
Almost none of them, I can report, actually act like assholes in the store. Indeed, Dilligaf’s customers are unfailingly polite and loyal, presenting themselves as people who do not give a fuck yet who are often quite hungry for Bohica Bill’s approval. One thing that’s funny about this is that Massry, despite his best efforts, is also not much of an asshole. “No, I’m not gonna snort cocaine off a hooker’s ass!” he said, laughing, when I asked him if that particular shirt represents some hidden aspect of his personality. His wife, by all accounts, hates his Dilligaf designs—he doesn’t wear any of this stuff in Miami—and his daughters, one of whom once fled a mall shooting, have begged him to get rid of all the gun merch. He has agonized over whether to feature merchandise with a Confederate flag, eventually deciding against. In person he’s ingratiating, charming, eager to please.
Not to mention that, while Massry seems like a boilerplate late-in-life conservative, he doesn’t have any particular affection for Trump, or for his MAGA die-hards. “I ask my customers, ‘Who would you rather meet? Trump or Jesus?’ ” he told me. “They always answer Trump.” He laughed, disbelieving. “I’m like, these people are fucking idiots.”
Most Trump Shit stores seem to be passion projects owned by true believers. In my state, Virginia, two such stores have dominated coverage of the phenomenon for years; both are run by MAGA die-hards. Another just opened in February, owned by the former head of the Appomattox County GOP. “Everything’s a fad,” Massry told me, and someday, somehow, Trump will not be the draw he is now. What happens to those stores then? They’ll find something else, Massry says—that’s what capitalists do. “Even if he doesn’t win, these MAGA people aren’t going away.”
The more I thought about it, about MAGA Republicanism and not giving a fuck as an ethos, the more I wondered if those two sensibilities can truly be separated in the minds of most Americans anymore. Massry and his store exemplify, in some ways, the kind of callow opportunism that many Democrats have long associated with Trump himself and the elite Republicans who sign on to his “populist” schtick. Trump, they say, doesn’t actually care about the American working class, or about abortion, or about the Supreme Court. He cares about Trump. Massry, meanwhile, told me: “I don’t give a fuck about Trump. I give a fuck about Dilligaf.”
With Dilligaf nearing its 20th year in Lake George, Massry’s mulling his next move. He’d love to find an investor. “I can’t be running T-shirts from store to store all summer, not forever,” he said. Like every merchant in Lake George, Massry works like a dog from Memorial Day to Labor Day, making his entire nut for the year in that three-month stretch.
Now that a new mayor’s taken office, Massry claims he’s reached an agreement with the village. He wants to renovate one of the buildings his elderly mother still owns, a $1.1 million corner lot that includes the biggest of the Dilligaf stores. (His father died of COVID a few years ago. This doesn’t stop Massry from selling a T-shirt proclaiming the wearer can provide “UNVAXED SPERM $69 A LOAD.”) “Because I pissed off the village board for so many years, I knew they were never gonna let me change this building without a compromise. I would have to censor the shirts,” he said. “And guess what? I’m ready. You know why? I’m gonna inherit this building. It looks like crap. D’you know what I mean?”
That new mayor, Ray Perry, told me that he’s optimistic about this agreement. “He’s a likable guy. He really is,” Perry said. “He said, ‘As soon as I get my approval for a new façade’—which I didn’t hamper, or push for—‘I will cover all the swear words and everything that’s indecent.’ ” Bob Blais has told Perry that Massry simply can’t be trusted, but Perry told me he’s going to take Massry at his word.
“I couldn’t work with Bob,” Massry told me. “Bob was impossible. Ray is somebody who I have respect for and who I can work with. We’re friends.”
When I asked Perry if he would call Bill Massry a friend, he said, “I have been friendly with Bill for many, many years.” He paused and considered his words. “I would consider Bill a friend,” he finally said, “if it’ll help the agreement.”
Dan Kois
It’s a Friday afternoon and Dillgaf is packed. Massry runs from the front of the store to the back, walkie-talkie on his waist squawking as employees request help at the registers. He runs down to the store’s basement, a nightmarish warren of shelves stuffed with what looks like tens of thousands of shirts, hoodies, and other unsold or not-yet-sold merchandise.
As he works, he talks. He points to one of his Second Amendment shirts. “These people don’t just have one gun,” he says. “They have more guns than you can imagine.”
We pass one of his Don’t Tread on Me shirts. “I looked up the origin, it comes from the revolution, whatchamacallit, ‘The British are coming, the British are coming.’ It comes from that guy.”
“Oh, look what this guy’s buying!” Massry shouts. A baby-faced customer with tattoos and a long graying beard holds up a sweatshirt: YOU DON’T ALWAYS NEED A PLAN BRO, SOMETIMES YOU JUST NEED BALLS.
The customer is named Steve, and he’s here from New Jersey with his daughter. “What’s that on your knuckles?” Massry asks him. Steve holds them out so we can see the letters: HOLD FAST. “You’re American as fuck!” Massry says admiringly. “A lot of my customers put Dilligaf on their arms.” (Indeed, in the days following my visit, Massry will text me 13 photos of such tattoos.)
“My brother and I were talking last night about doing that,” Steve says. “Dilligaf on our knuckles.”
“Oh, yeah, because it’s eight letters! Four on each. How long have you known about Dilligaf?”
“Well, shit man, we met you two years ago,” Steve says.
Massry clearly doesn’t remember him. “Well, welcome back, motherfucker!” He turns to me: “This is what I do for a living. Interact with the customers. All right, Steve, man, thanks.”
“Sure,” says Steve happily. “Always nice to see you around.”
“Listen to the music I play,” Massry tells me as we hustle back up to the front of the store. It’s Blake Shelton’s “Ol’ Red.” “I don’t like country music, but I’ve learned to respect it,” he says. “I’m here for them.”
He straightens a shirt that’s hanging crookedly. Suddenly he reaches out and takes my arm. “But I don’t know if I want you publishing that I said I’m here for them,” he says. “Don’t say that.”
I’m taken aback. “You’ve been clear the whole time we’ve talked that you’re doing all this for the customers,” I say.
“I am,” he groans, “but don’t put it down that I’m a capitalist.”
“Don’t put it down?” In our time together, he has said “I’m a capitalist” 11 times.
“I don’t want the reader to think I’m some fuckin’ …”
“But you are a capitalist!”
“I knowwww,” he says. “I know I said that. But I said Howard Stern to you, too. He’s my idol.”
He’s told me he’s always wanted to advertise on Stern’s show, but it’s just too expensive. “Oh, Howard will be in the story, don’t worry,” I say.
“I’m the Howard Stern of clothing. Howard’s the king of all media. I’m the king of T-shirts.”
“Honestly,” I say, “I hope Howard reads this story and calls you.”
Massry laughs and embraces me, squeezes me tight. “I will be Slate magazine’s biggest advertiser,” he says fervently. “D’you understand? D’you understand?”
His walkie-talkie chimes, and he releases me. “OK, I’m on my way up,” he says into the walkie. Steve’s waiting at the register with his daughter, who appears to be in her 20s, each of them holding several shirts.
“You gonna do your knuckles with Dilligaf?” Massry asks.
“If my wife lets me.”
“I hear ya, man,” Massry says, punching the register. “We’re in the same boat. My wife owns my ass. She owns my fuckin’ ass.” He points to the two free beach bags he gives customers who spend $50, one of which is tie-dyed with the Dilligaf logo, the other of which is black with FUCK YOU emblazoned on it. “Do you want the tie-die bag or the fuck you bag?”
“Fuck you bag,” Steve says.
“I can’t hear you. Which bag you want?”
“Fuck you bag!”
“Which one?!”
“Fuck you bag!!” They’re all laughing.
“I hear you! I heard it. Dan, that’s my favorite part of the job. D’you understand? One oh six eighty-nine.”
As Steve pays, his daughter asks, “Can I have a sticker for free?”
“Yeah, I’ll give you a sticker for free,” Massry says, with the forced jollity of a bartender at 2 a.m. “I already gave you a fuck you bag for free, but I’ll give you a fuckin’ sticker for free. You know why? Because I fuckin’ like you, motherfucker!”
“Motherfucker!” she says with delight.
“OK, here you go,” he says. “Enjoy your fuck you bag.”
“Thank you, my man.”
“Motherfucker!”
“Motherfucker!” says Steve. “Have a good day.”
Another employee grabs the register, and Massry and I sit on the Adirondack chairs outside the store. I ask Massry if he ever feels bad about offending people.
He scoffs. “How do I offend anybody in there?”
“Your stuff is offensive on purpose!”
“It’s funny!”
“If I was a woman and I walked into that store,” I say, “I would probably feel offended that so many of the shirts are either about me being a bitch or a cum receptacle.”
“To them, bitch is like a point of pride.”
“But there are definitely people who are offended by your shirts. That doesn’t make you feel bad?”
“You can’t please everybody, Dan. You cannot please everybody. I have daughters like you have daughters. I’m not a misogynistic person. No way. But my customers, if it doesn’t have bitch, ass, or fuck on it, they don’t buy it.”
I’m trying to get at something here, but I don’t think I’m quite reaching it, something about the way that Massry has killed some kind of human quality in himself while keeping pace with his ever-more-eager-to-offend, ever-angrier customers. About what a place like Dilligaf means to the people who want to return Trump to the throne—about the gift Massry has given them with these stores, even if he’s just out to get them to spend their money. I try again. “I 100 percent agree with you that every single thing in this store is totally protected by the First Amendment,” I say. “But honestly, it makes me a little bit sad to see all of your ingenuity and energy and hard work put toward something so mean-spirited.”
“That’s your perception,” he says instantly.
“You don’t think a shirt that straight-up says, ‘Fuck you’ is mean-spirited?”
“No, I disagree with you on that. That’s free speech.”
“If someone walked up to you on the street and said, ‘Fuck you,’ right to your face, that wouldn’t be mean?”
“OK. But it’s free speech.”
“It’s just a bummer,” I say, lamely.
“You’re not my customer,” Bill says.
“You’re not your customer either,” I say.
But that’s where I’m wrong, he says. “I have Dilligaf in my brain,” he says, tapping the side of his head. “I am totally Mr. Dilligaf. An intelligent person, a businessman, listens to his customer base, listens, and I’m here for them. I’ve stressed that to you over and over. I’m here for them. I’m not here for me. I’m here for them.”
A few weeks after I leave Lake George, I get an email from Mayor Perry. “Bill has begun to censor the shirts in his windows!!” he writes. “Today is a very good day!”
Since my visit, Massry has sent a near-daily stream of texts, asking when the story will run. (“Dan if you write a good article on me and Dilligaf I’ll ask you to write my screenplay … I’ll even let u produce it … You have to have aspirations to be more than a writer for Slate.”) Now he sends me a photo of his front window and one of his bestselling designs. I EAT PUSSY LIKE A FAT KID EATS ICE CREAM, the shirt says, only now the word pussy is very slightly obscured by a sticker reading CENSORED. He tells me that the mayor insisted the word fuck be covered, but that he himself volunteered to add the sticker to pussy.
“More people are coming in as a result” of the stickers, he texts. “Don’t quote me when I say I feel like I’m making a mockery of it.”
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Publish date : 2024-10-26 06:09:00
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