I hope you haven’t finished your holiday shopping yet because now’s your chance to please the Coolidge lover in your life. And we’ve all got one of them, haven’t we?

Pictured above: Two items from the “Coolidge Was Cooler” line of VTGOP merch. All five items feature the same hastily-photoshopped image of Calvin Coolidge sporting a pair of aviator sunglasses. See, Coolidge was cooler than Joe Biden of aviator sunglasses fame. Ha ha, cough.

This is the best design available from the Vermont Republican Party’s online “SHOP” page. Hard to believe I know, but the rest of the collection is even sadder.

What else do we have here? Oh yes, the “Let’s Go Brandon” line, including bumper magnet, T-shirt and ballcap. These are presumably left over from the signal event of party chair Paul Dame’s tenure*: a November 2021 rally in his hometown of Brandon that was an unsubtle nod to the then-current anti-Biden chant. The VTGOP has been trying to unload these things ever since.

*Well, it was the signal event until this November’s disastrous election for the party. That’s got “Paul Dame” written all over it.

The rest of the VTGOP gift collection consists of those stupid collector cards featuring 2022 Republican candidates for office. That’s right, it’s not too late to snap up a card with one-term representatives Samantha Lefebvre or Sally Achey, or one of a number picturing failed “stealth conservatives” like Nichole Loati, Rob North, Joe Gervais, Maryse Dunbar, Jon Christiano, Roger Drury, and of course Jarrod Sammis. You can even get the recently-undeployed Gerald Malloy!

How much? I hear you asking.

Try $30 apiece.

Yep, thirty dollars.

There are 53 candidate cards up for sale. I hope they offer quantity discounts, because a full set at full price will run you a cool $1,590.

I can understand the impulse to set up a SHOP for your organization. Might raise a little money, give donors something for their trouble, even get free publicity from all those “Let’s Go, Brandon” caps and shirts flooding our public spaces. But this SHOP only serves to reinforce the VTGOP’s well-earned reputation as a party full of bad ideas and worse candidates. They’d be better off closing it down and tossing the remaining inventory into a bonfire.