The Curious Case of Trumpy Bear: How Non-Profits Skirt Election Laws

These shadow players are influencing the election — whether regulators like it or not.

Trumpy Bear seems too absurd to be true. An ad hawking the teddy bear — complete with a comb-over, red tie and an American flag blanket zipped into its stuffing — broke the internet last November after airing on a local Fox affiliate. It was seen millions of times, seemingly the perfect Christmas gift for the president’s backers and the perfect gag gift for his detractors.

As fact-checking website Snopes tweeted: “Yes, it’s real. No, we don’t know why.” And we still don’t know for sure. While news reports show Trumpy Bear to be the invention of a New Jersey woman sold by a Dallas direct response marketing company, its creators are not required to disclose their investors.

As countries around the world prep for skateboarding’s Olympic debut, these tweens and teens are reaping the benefits.

From winning contests to effortlessly executing the same tricks as their decades-older peers, the new generation of female skateboarders can do just about anything. Anything, that is, except get into a PG-13 movie.

Around the world, female skateboarders as young as 10 have been turning pro and setting their sights on collecting medals in global contests, from Southern California’s Vans U.S. Open Pro Series to Minneapolis’ X Games to the upcoming SLS World Championship in São Paulo, Brazil. Skateboarding has always harbored hopeful young teenagers trying to earn a living on four wheels. But at this year’s X Games, where the world’s best converge each summer to show off their stuff, an undeniable trend emerged along both age and gender lines: The 13 youngest athletes at X Games Minneapolis 2019 were skateboarders, and eight of them were women.

Tweegevrietjies were a delicious middle finger to a prime minister who went back on his promise to South African women.

After Prime Minister J.B.M. Hertzog promised to give women the vote and Coloured people (the accepted South African term for people of mixed race) equal rights, Cape Malay women created a tartlet in his honor: the hertzoggie. When, a couple of years later, the Women’s Enfranchisement Act of 1930 made it clear that he’d be following through only on the first of these promises, the women once again took to their ovens, creating a 2.0 version of the tartlet with brown and pink icing, calling it the tweegevrietjie — or “two-faced cake.”