Richard Kligman never planned to sell President Donald Trump and “Make America Great Again” merchandise. The opportunity emerged in 2016, when customers at the kite shop he ran with his brother in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, began asking for MAGA hats and flags. In 2018, the brothers opened the Trump Super Store in the vacant storefront next door to keep up with demand.

“You’d have thought I was selling crack,” Kligman joked to Fortune. Now he wants out.

“You have to read the writing on the wall that as we go into ’27, it’s definitely going to fall off, and I’d like to be out of it as much as I could be by the end of ’27,” he said.

Sales were “going gangbusters” between the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, Kligman said, and the brothers worked seven days a week to keep up with demand from locals and visitors from around the country. Since then, he said, sales of Trump-branded merchandise have fallen 39% from their 2024 levels.

“A lot of the Trump merchandise stores across the country are closing because they see that things are going to change a bit, and the demand is not what it once was,” Kligman said. “It’s absolutely gone down, but it had to because he can’t run again.”

Kligman is far from alone in that view. The “Make America Great Again” slogan helped carry Trump to the White House in 2016 and has been plastered across hats, shirts, flags, and other collectibles for more than a decade. But MAGA merch sellers and suppliers across the country told Fortune their sales have slipped from the heights of the 2024 election, when Amazon sellers reported an estimated $140 million in Trump-themed merchandise from April through September, according to e-commerce marketing platform Omnisend. Sellers have cut prices, closed stores, branched into other patriotic merchandise, or turned to Trump’s rallies for sales. With Trump barred from another presidential run by the Constitution’s 22nd Amendment, which limits presidents to two elected terms, the business faces an uncertain future after he leaves office.

Steven Slaton, who has run the Trumped Store and Coffee Shop in Show Low, Arizona, for a decade with his wife Karen, told Fortune he has felt the shift, describing current sales as “night and day” compared with the 2016 and 2024 election seasons. He estimated that September sales were down 20% to 25% from the same month in 2024. The couple has begun clearing out older merchandise, marking hats and shirts that once cost $30 down to $10.

“It’s like everybody took a big, deep breath and then everybody’s looking for a new type of gear,” Slaton said.

Slaton attributed part of the decline to customers with less money to spend as food, housing, and gas prices strain their budgets. Economic dissatisfaction is also weighing on Trump politically. A Fox News poll released Oct. 14 found that 77% of registered voters disapproved of his handling of inflation and 70% disapproved of his handling of the economy, while his overall approval rating fell to 36% — the lowest figure Fox News has recorded during either of Trump’s two presidencies.

The slowdown has been severe enough to push some stores out of business. Fortune found that at least three independent Trump merch stores have closed this year alone — in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee — including one that made 350 sales a day at an average of $60 each.

Manufacturers are the pullback as well. Eric Turney, sales director of custom product manufacturing firm The Monterey Company, told Fortune the company earned about $250,000 in 2024 making MAGA hats, keychains, and buttons for nine wholesalers, but now counts only three regular wholesalers for that merchandise.

“Once he went into office, [demand] really dropped off the face of the cliff,” Turney said, noting that Monterey averaged 15 merch orders per month in 2024 but has received only 13 in total from 2025 through this year.

Online interest is fading too. After peaking in Google search popularity in December 2018 and November 2024, interest in the search term “MAGA hat” has plummeted by 95% as of October, according to Google Trends data.

Rallies are a bright spot, but the strategy is still shifting

Ahead of the November midterms, Trump’s rallies for Republican midterm candidates have given some sellers a lift even as broader MAGA merch sales slow. Ronald Solomon, president of The MAGA Mall, a wholesaler and retailer of Republican and conservative-branded products, told Fortune the rallies have renewed demand for MAGA and Trump 2028 hats, recalling that he sold “a tremendous amount” of them at a rally in Vandalia, Ohio last week. The Trump Organization itself began offering $50 “Trump 2028” hats in April 2025.

“During the summer, the MAGA stuff wasn’t selling as much, but now all of a sudden it’s selling a lot again,” Solomon said.

Still, his MAGA product sales in recent months are down 34% from 2024, a drop he attributes to 2026 being a midterm year, when congressional and state contests are on the ballot rather than a presidential race. “There’s no way I expected it to be as brisk as a presidential year,” he said.

For some sellers, the slowdown has pushed a change in strategy. Sany Dash, who said she has sold $63 million in Trump merchandise over the past nine years, closed all three of her USA Trump Stores this year as revenue fell: two in Texas (Gainesville and Arlington) and one in Loveland, Colorado. She may open a store in Dallas, but plans to focus on selling patriotic-themed jewelry and clothing at rallies and other political events, where she estimates 40% to 50% of attendees buy merch.

“The stores are not doing well, but the rallies are doing incredibly good,” Dash said. “We have to look at, logistically, where we’re going to open up our new store, and it may not say Trump—it may just say ‘patriotic merch,’ I don’t know yet.”

Dash sells merch only for Trump and doubts the MAGA brand will carry the same pull once he leaves office.

“After Trump is gone, I don’t see MAGA continue because Trump is the face of MAGA,” she said.

Slaton is preparing for that possibility too. He said the Trumped Store might change its name and offerings to support whoever becomes the new Republican figurehead.

“We’re telling people we’ll probably transition over to JD Vance or Marco [Rubio] or whomever the prospective nominee is going to be,” he said. “We’ll have to figure out how we’re going to do that.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.