When your kitchen staple goes MAGA

Two months ago, in the bustling democracy of the r/instantpot subreddit—565,000 members strong—one of its most prolific posters, the enigmatically named 000ArdeliaLortz000, sounded the alarm. “Instant Pot goes to the dark side,” they wrote.

The post read like a kitchen-appliance thriller: when Instant Brands went bankrupt in 2023, the company was scooped up by a New York private equity firm, Centre Lane Partners, which — according to the post — planned to release a Trump-branded Instant Pot to bankroll the Trump Presidential Library. “If you’re as horrified as I am,” the user urged, “write to them.”

In the comments, dismay mixed with confusion. One person gamely reconstructed the Instant Pot’s corporate biography: invented by a Chinese immigrant to Canada, nurtured in Canadian hands for most of its life, sold off in a leveraged buyout, stripped for parts, and now—apparently—poised to make, as another commenter put it, “fascist-themed cookware.” Another tried to dissuade owners from destroying their current models: “Just remember that doing that is a waste of money. It’s already spent. Just don’t give them any more.”

And then there were the pragmatists, asking the only question that really mattered: “So… is the Ninja Foodi a good alternative to an Instant Pot?”

The source of the uproar turned out to be an announcement by Alex Olson, a Nestpoint lobbyist, published in Semafor on June 16. Olson claimed that Instant Pot—now in Centre Lane Partners’ hands—would soon roll out a “Make America Great Again” model, with proceeds earmarked for Donald Trump’s presidential library.

“All of these companies … are extremely supportive of President Trump and the MAGA Agenda, standing with the president with their efforts to onshore and show public support,” Olson said.

Weeks later, The New York Times picked up the story under the headline, “What Happened to the MAGA Instant Pot?” By then, the product had vanished — no special-edition pressure cookers had ever been made — but the damage, like a pot of beans left too long on the stovetop, was already done. In the marketplace, and in the subreddit, the whole episode was starting to look a lot like the Tesla-Elon Musk effect: a beloved, broadly appealing product suddenly recast as a political statement.

“They’re making the same blunder that Musk did with Tesla,” one commenter said. “You’re a corporation, so we know you’re terrible. There’s no benefit to turning your product into an ad for that fact — making customers equally terrible just by association.”

As The New York Times reported last week, the MAGA Instant Pot wasn’t just a branding stunt. According to lobbying filings and interviews cited by The Times, Centre Lane was angling for Trump’s help on tariffs and an antitrust inquiry. The MAGA merch was part of a second-term tactic: splashy public flattery paired with gifts to the president’s cause.

There was just one problem — they reportedly didn’t get the Trump Organization’s permission to use his trademarks or offer him a cut, so the actual products never went into production. Emails reviewed by The Times suggest the door isn’t fully closed: the lobbyists hinted they might revisit the idea, this time with Trump’s blessing.

But when asked by The Times if the plan was officially dead, both Centre Lane and the lobbying firm dodged the question. By the time the paper was done untangling the MAGA Instant Pot mystery, the political subplot had mostly fizzled. But the saga had peeled back a deeper, sadder truth: the Instant Pot’s problem wasn’t just image management. It was relevance — and, increasingly, affection.

The magic had already been leaking out for years.

As Eater’s Bettina Makalintal noted back in 2022 — which, in the warped timeline of post-pandemic life, feels both recent and impossibly far away — the shine had already started to dull.

“In 2018, I bought an Instant Pot, as one does when pressured by social media hype,” she wrote. “I dreamed of unsoaked beans going from dried to delicious in a flash and of rich stews, whose shockingly short cooking times would be my secret.”

Four years later, she’d logged maybe a dozen uses. The whole “set it and forget it” ethos clashed with her impulse to hover over a pot, tasting and meddling. And the thing took up a small continent’s worth of counter space. It ended up on the highest shelf, dusty and exiled.

When she finally decided to resell her model online, she expected to see a trickle of similar listings. Instead, they were everywhere. And not just in New York. In city after city, the marketplace was flooded with cheap, gently-used pressure cookers.

Makalintal offered two main explanations: First, the product’s own success cannibalized future demand. If you already own one, why buy another? And second, a new countertop darling had arrived to soak up the hype: the air fryer. As searches for “Instant Pot” declined, “air fryer” surged in a neat, inverse curve.

But now the Instant Pot’s challenges go beyond just shifting kitchen trends and product cycles. When a beloved product becomes tangled up with politics — or worse, a polarizing political figure — it risks alienating the very people who made it a household name. It’s a cautionary tale that feels especially salient when you look at how Tesla has fared since Elon Musk tried to hitch his star to Trump’s political drama.

Back in July 2025, Musk shocked markets by announcing the formation of a new political party, the “America Party,” positioning himself as a disruptor of the entrenched two-party system. The fallout was swift: Tesla’s stock plunged nearly 7% on the first trading day after the announcement, wiping out roughly $68 billion in shareholder value. Musk’s personal fortune took a staggering $15 billion hit in the days that followed.

Wall Street analysts were quick to point out the growing fatigue investors felt toward Musk’s increasingly controversial political stances. This wasn’t just a business move; it was a full-on plunge into political activism — one that sent ripples through markets and Musk’s carefully crafted brand.

Trump didn’t hold back either. Calling Musk a “TRAIN WRECK” on his own social media platform, Trump publicly slammed the billionaire for going “off the rails,” a rebuke that underlined how messy this political-business mashup had become.

That turbulence wasn’t limited to Twitter spats. In the real world, a growing number of Tesla owners were quietly saying goodbye. Car resellers and auto lots began to report that the used Tesla market was heating up as owners began ditching their vehicles. “I just became increasingly concerned with Elon Musk and what he was doing, and the Nazi salute was the tipping point,” Dr. Jerome Winegarden of Ann Arbor, Mich., told the Times back in April.

He traded in his Tesla Model 3 — which he had only driven 35,000 miles — for a Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup. The car fetched $18,000 as a trade-in, well below the original sales price of around $40,000. “The symbolism was just too much. I felt shame just driving the car,” Winegarden continued.

Now, this wave of disillusionment has rippled from garages and into kitchens. Home cooks who once loved their Instant Pot found themselves on a similar quest: to hold onto the models that came before the political storm.

“So I won’t ever buy another new Instant Pot after the Trump debacle,” one Reddit user lamented, “but there are tons on thrift store shelves and at garage sales. I’d like to get a backup IP that’s from an older generation since those had far higher production quality. Is there any easy way to tell which generation an Instant Pot is from?”

As fall edges closer and weeknights grow shorter, the question remains: which countertop appliance will step up as the new hero of the dinner rush? After the new Instant Pot found itself simmering in a political stew that left many with a bitter aftertaste, the kitchen is wide open for the next contender.