When a photo of his heart-shaped "Build That Wall" Valentine's Day cookie first went viral, Washington state bakery owner Kenneth Bellingham apologized for the controversial joke, and said it was unlikely he'd be making any more of the cookies. But after thousands of orders from across the country came in, he changed his tune. "I wasn’t going to sell those cookies. That wasn’t my plan," Bellingham tells Q13 Fox. But now he's the busiest he's ever been, and has started selling cookies reading "Build the Wall" "because people ask for them," he says. "No, I don’t think it’s racist. I think it’s about border security." However, he says he does not plan to ship the cookies across the country.
Just days after the story first broke, Bellingham told KOMO News he was "unapologizing" for the cookie, and that—despite saying on Facebook in a since-deleted post that he would no longer be making any more "cookies of a political nature"—he had even started making cookies that read "Make This Cookie Great Again." He said business had tripled since the story went viral and that some people need to lighten up (he also made at least one cookie reading "Lighten Up"). He's even started a GoFundMe campaign, though it's so far only raised $536 of its $20,000 goal. But it's not just walls his cookies are advertising; in a recent Facebook post, he shared a photo of heart-shaped cookies reading "Build the Love." (Bellingham initially said a border wall is "not anything that I endorse.")