Well I think I just realised why they do it. There’s this longstanding conspiracy theory that whenever a politician does a fuckup they conveniently say keywords associated with the fuckup but put it in a different context (like say, scandal related to trains, so they get into a model train hobby), so if people search up their name plus trains what shows up are articles talking about their new hobby.

Just thought of this because I was searching up “Banana Republic” in the context of neocolonialism (while reading my country’s history) and besides the Wikipedia page being the first result, the next results were that store. And I remembered this reply.