Trump Fragrances add to an ever-expanding list of merchandise branded with Trump’s name and likeness, which now includes a cellphone, high-top and low-top sneakers, diamond-encrusted watches, guitars with “Make America Great Again” emblazoned across the necks and digital trading cards featuring him in an array of theatrically heroic poses, sometimes in superhero costume.
The products are sold through licensing deals that, according to his financial disclosures, bring him over US$7 million in income.
Victory 45-47 is the second line of presidential fragrances; the first, called Fight, Fight, Fight, was released during the campaign. That scent’s packaging featured a triumphant photo of Trump with his fist in the air, a nod to an assassination attempt against him last year.
In videos online, perfume reviewers and enthusiasts noted that the actual bottle of Fight, Fight, Fight that shipped featured just a sticker logo on the bottle but that the fragrance smelled “fresh”.
Trump Fragrances “represent winning”, said Trump, standing in front of four American flags in a video on the company’s website.
“Get yourself a bottle and don’t forget to grab one for your loved ones, too. They’ll thank you and they’ll even smell good.”
The Trump Fragrances website is scant on other specifics, like where the products are manufactured or what the ingredients are, and representatives for the licensing business did not respond to a request for comment. The individual product pages say that the scents are in stock and that they will “ship immediately”.
As for a description of the actual scents, the site says the men’s Victory 45-47 “blends rich, masculine notes”, while the women’s version offers a “sophisticated, subtly feminine scent”.
What, exactly, do masculinity and femininity smell like? Or what does winning even smell like?
The men’s cologne is “inoffensive, rather quiet, office-safe”, with hints of cardamom and an amber-woody finish, Elena Knezevic, editor and co-founder of the fragrance forum Fragrantica, who got her hands on the bottles, wrote in a review of the product.
And the women’s perfume smells like vanilla and gardenia with a “light gourmand strawberry touch”, Knezevic wrote. Overall, “likable and general but not at all bad”.
Generic smells are common in celebrity perfumes, Derek Guy, a menswear critic and writer, said in an interview.
“Among people who are into perfume, there’s generally often scepticism of a celebrity perfume,” he said, because they tend to lean toward more crowd-pleasing scents in order to sell more units.
This product is not, in other words, born out of a passion for niche, interesting smells, he added.
Trump, of course, was already familiar with the world of celebrity fragrance. In 2012, he released a line called “Success”. In a GQ article about that perfume, which referred to him as a “scent enthusiast”, he was asked to elaborate on what success smelled like.
“I can’t say sweetness,” he said. “I can’t say flowery. I would say it has a good scent.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alisha Haridasani Gupta
Photographs by: Haiyun Jiang
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
