The curious case of the Trump-faced Woodford Reserve

You may have noticed that we’re living through an historically difficult moment for the American experiment, what with various Constitutional crises being implemented by a venal cabal of MAGA bootlickers, power-mad looters, and broccoli-haired 4chan fuccbois. Even more so than centi-billionaire and apartheid enthusiast Elon Musk, Donald Trump is the face of this national emergency. A narrow majority of voters supported his presidency; a much larger majority of the American drinking public—Harris voters, third-party voters, non-voters—did not. Those groups differs on whether the present shitshow is good or bad (it’s bad), but nobody really disagrees that Trump’s jowly mug is its avatar.

Trying to sell booze on Trump’s coattails is the stuff of fly-by-night grifters. Multinational liquor conglomerates, lumbering and risk-averse with broad customer bases, have mostly steered clear. Still, these are strange times we live in. So when I received a tip about “Presidential Reserve Donald Trump Whiskey,” a heavily marked up bottle of Woodford Reserve with the president’s unmistakable visage engraved on its side, I looked into it.

The tipster (who shall remain anonymous; you can too) sent me a link to this otherwise unremarkable 750ml bottle of The Brown-Forman Corporation’s mid-shelf bourbon for sale on the site of a California liquor store called Corked, where it’s listed for $79.99. That’s a wild upcharge: as I write this, the same bottle, sans Trump silhouette, is on sale for $36.99 via Virginia’s control system, and cheaper elsewhere. Still, from sneakers to shitcoins, Trump supporters have proven themselves the biggest marks in the world. A ~150% gouge on a bottle of widely available brown liquor with our famously teetotaling president’s face etched on the side of it seems almost reasonable by comparison. Almost.

“Gotta imagine B-F wouldn’t love this, but who knows,” my tipster texted. The markup is one thing; the gibberish copy on the listing, which reads like it was written by Tater Ted Kaczynski, is another. The more fundamental question they were getting at is the provenance of “Presidential” Woodford Reserve. On one hand, there’s a market for third-party bottle modifications, but on the other, B-F has also done some bizarre things involving famous faces and its whiskey brands in the recent past. Having already retreated from its corporate diversity programs over the summer, and gifted Woodford Reserve to Kentucky’s senior senator, Mitch McConnell, to distribute at a Trump inauguration event last month, doing a limited-edition run of bottles with the loyalty-obsessed president’s face acid-etched on their sides isn’t beyond fathoming.

Fathomable, maybe, but not factual. “Presidential” Woodford Reserve isn’t B-F’s doing. A representative at Corked, Dani Chahda, confirm via email this past Saturday that the shop is putting Trump’s face on the bottles with its own engraving machine. On Monday morning, B-F spokesperson Elizabeth Conway confirmed as much to me. “Consumers who purchase Woodford Reserve occasionally have images and messages engraved on the bottle,” she wrote in a brief statement. “These engravings occur after the point of purchase.”

That all tracks. But Conway also claimed that “Woodford Reserve does not endorse political candidates or engage in politics,” which isn’t really true, and elides the bigger question at hand. Namely: whether B-F endorses its retailers engaging Woodford Reserve in politics, and what it might do about the Trump bottles if it didn’t.

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