His most famous button might be a 1996 pin for Hillary “Rodman” Clinton, turning her hair orange to replicate the N.B.A. star Dennis Rodman. She included a reference to it in her 1996 Democratic National Convention speech.
Berkowitz was particularly proud of his work during the Watergate scandal (“4 More Years, Mr. Nixon, Then 10 to 20”), and recalled designing a button featuring Ronald Reagan and George Orwell that didn’t land with attendees at the 1984 Republican National Convention.
“Very few people had any idea who George Orwell was,” he said. “They wanted to know why I wasn’t for George Bush.”
Buttons he designed are at the Smithsonian and other museums throughout the country. Currently, his biggest sellers are pins that show support for Ukraine. But his top requests are for pro-Trump merchandise — items that say things like “Amend the Constitution,” or “Re-elect Trump to a Third Term.”
During the 2016 campaign, Berkowitz churned out Trump-inspired merchandise. He recalls that one of his friends placed an order for 10,000 MAGA hats. “I had nothing against Trump when he ran or when he won,” he said. But that started to change, and was cemented after the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.
He didn’t sell any merchandise for the candidates running in Pennsylvania’s G.O.P. primaries this week, either, calling the candidates “vicious” and “anti-American.”
The ‘log cabin and hard cider’ candidate
Biden is far from the first politician to find that criticism of a rival or an opposing group of voters can be flipped around into a rallying cry.