Turned Away for Wearing a Make America Great Again Hat
News Analysis
What Does the MAGA Chapeau Hateful Now?
Millions of Americans put them on during President Trump's offset campaign. Volition they always accept them off?
A crowd wearing MAGA hats watches as President Donald Trump delivers remarks during a 2018 Brand America Corking Again Rally in Wisconsin. Credit... Tom Brenner for The New York Times
What happens to campaign merch after the votes are counted?
Near oftentimes, unsold leftovers are donated to charities, recycled, or given to staff and volunteers as keepsakes. Optimistic candidates tuck away excess inventory for possible reuse. Items already in circulation are converted overnight into memorabilia, tokens of victory or defeat. A few bumper stickers hang on to say "I told you so," or merely because they're a pain to peel off.
More often than not, shirts and buttons languish in closets and drawers. Side by side end: austerity store, and so the vintage store. Finally, they're collectible, even if only as ironic accessories. The afterlife of entrada merchandise is unusually literal, because, after Ballot Day, these objects experience something like decease.
All of this relies, though, on the entrada actually coming to an end. What if information technology doesn't?
Paradigm
From the primeval days of Donald J. Trump's 2016 campaign, information technology was articulate that the red "Make America Great Again" hat was here to stay. It was an unusual item from the start, promoting a slogan rather than a logo or a proper noun, and ofttimes worn by the candidate himself. On Mr. Trump, the cap perched incongruously atop a laboriously manufactured image: expensive suit, expensive tie, the confront, the hair and and so, suddenly, siren ruby.
Most campaign merchandise simply inhabits a generic garment and leaves it unchanged. This yr, the Biden-Harris campaign distributed enormous numbers of signs, shirts, buttons and accessories to supporters around the country, only to the extent they'll be remembered, it'due south for what they said — "Truth Over Lies," for instance — not the form they took.
The MAGA hat, in contrast, claimed a shape and a color. By 2016, red hats of any variety drew double takes. In belatedly 2019, the Trump campaign appear information technology was about to sell its millionth MAGA hat, but the true count — including unauthorized Trump hats sold at rallies, in gift shops and around Washington, D.C. — is surely much higher. These hats aren't and then much souvenirs or keepsakes; they're part of an ongoing show and continue to be produced.
On Amazon, unofficial MAGA hats are sold past the thou by Chinese due east-commerce entrepreneurs, nether brands such equally VPCOK (trademark of Shenzhenshi Nuobei Muying Yongpin Youxian Gongsi; top-rated Amazon review: "I'll exist wearing mine to go vote :)") and AMASSLOVE (trademark of Shenzhen Longhua New area Yemili GarmentFactory; ane,000 reviews). These hats vary in pattern and text, decorated with boosted flags, or with subtly different typography, but they get the point across. On November. 9, the AMASSLOVE hat was week's top seller in Amazon's "Men'due south Novelty Baseball Caps" section.
Image
Despite winning in 2016, President Trump never fully accepted the results of the election, fabricating claims about voter fraud to account for his loss of the popular vote. He never stopped campaigning, either. On the president'south head, the MAGA chapeau worked to bridge two images: Mr. Trump, the candidate, and Mr. Trump, the president.
Perched atop the bodily caput of government, the MAGA hat took on new meaning. It was still a way to limited support of the president, his policies and his orientation toward the world, but its power to provoke grew alongside the power of its best-known wearer.
The MAGA hat, of class, was never and then simple as a style to express a voting preference — it was embroidered with a historically freighted phrase and understood to suggest that America, under assault past external and internal enemies, had to be taken back from them.
In January 2019, Robin Givhan of The Washington Post described the lid'due south development as a symbol. "In the starting time, the MAGA hat had multiple meanings and nuance," she wrote. "But the definition has evolved. The rosy nostalgia has turned specious and rank."
"The MAGA hat speaks to America's greatness with lies of omission and contortion," she continued. "To article of clothing a MAGA hat is to wrap oneself in a Confederate flag." Charles Blow, an opinion columnist at The Times, wrote that what was once Trump merch had become a visual stand-in for "Trumpism" — "a new iconography of white supremacy, white nationalist defiance and white cultural defense."
Their assay was dismissed past many of the president's supporters as withal some other slander — as an attempt to smear people who supported the president as neo-Confederates, when, in overwhelming numbers, they were but voting along party lines. Christine Rosen, of Commentary, characterized their columns every bit an "attempt to demonize their opponents past casting Trump supporters as 'the other.'"
Even granting that criticism, and setting aside insinuations about ideological overlap, months afterwards, in a fresh political context, the comparisons made past Ms. Givhan and Mr. Blow nonetheless pose precisely the right questions about what happens to political symbols later defeat.
Image
If particulars of the future of the MAGA hat are in doubt, that it has a future is all but assured. With the president'southward refusal to acknowledge losing the election, expressions of back up are now bound up with his denial, defiance and insistence that he has been wronged.
In 2015, the MAGA slogan was defended every bit a broad expression of yearning for a nonspecific past; after 2016, the particulars of that yearning became much harder to deny. In 2021, a MAGA hat, truthful to its slogan, might still refer to a desire for restoration, only not of the vague "good one-time days" generations in the past, but of the four years immediately behind it. At that place are hints of the MAGA lid's future abroad, already, every bit loosely continued correct wing movements effectually the globe have adopted it, or versions of it, understanding, correctly, that its slogan was never simply literal.
The MAGA hat of the future would be a symbol of a lost cause; a hope, or a threat, that a movement might rise once again; and, finally, an expression of an ideology that sees any government merely one run by its own equally illegitimate simply that would exist dedicated, however implausibly, as a mere expression of support for fairness and security in elections.
Had there never been a MAGA chapeau, it would be hard to come up up with an item better suited to the needs of the president and his most agog supporters, tomorrow and in the years after, slogan and all. It's merchandise turned symbol of state now set up to fulfill its ultimate destiny every bit a commercial product. A president who never concedes, even if he steps aside, is telling a story that leaves open up a comforting option for the millions of people with MAGA hats at habitation: to keep wearing them.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/style/election-maga-hat.html
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