List of All Make America Great Again Hats
News Analysis
What Does the MAGA Hat Mean Now?
Millions of Americans put them on during President Trump's first entrada. Will they ever take them off?
What happens to entrada merch afterward the votes are counted?
Most often, 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 apportionment are converted overnight into memorabilia, tokens of victory or defeat. A few bumper stickers hang on to say "I told you so," or just because they're a hurting to skin off.
Mostly, shirts and buttons languish in closets and drawers. Side by side stop: thrift store, then the vintage store. Finally, they're collectible, even if only as ironic accessories. The afterlife of campaign trade is unusually literal, because, after Election Mean solar day, these objects feel something like expiry.
All of this relies, though, on the campaign actually coming to an terminate. What if it doesn't?
Epitome
From the earliest days of Donald J. Trump'southward 2016 campaign, it was clear that the red "Brand America Great Again" hat was hither to stay. It was an unusual particular from the starting time, promoting a slogan rather than a logo or a name, and oft worn by the candidate himself. On Mr. Trump, the cap perched incongruously atop a laboriously manufactured paradigm: expensive suit, expensive necktie, the face, the hair and then, suddenly, siren cherry.
Most campaign merchandise but inhabits a generic garment and leaves it unchanged. This year, the Biden-Harris campaign distributed enormous numbers of signs, shirts, buttons and accessories to supporters around the state, but to the extent they'll be remembered, it'due south for what they said — "Truth Over Lies," for instance — not the course they took.
The MAGA hat, in contrast, claimed a shape and a color. By 2016, scarlet hats of any variety drew double takes. In late 2019, the Trump entrada announced information technology was nigh to sell its millionth MAGA hat, but the true count — including unauthorized Trump hats sold at rallies, in gift shops and effectually Washington, D.C. — is surely much higher. These hats aren't so much souvenirs or keepsakes; they're part of an ongoing show and continue to be produced.
On Amazon, unofficial MAGA hats are sold by the thousand by Chinese e-commerce entrepreneurs, under brands such as VPCOK (trademark of Shenzhenshi Nuobei Muying Yongpin Youxian Gongsi; top-rated Amazon review: "I'll be wearing mine to get vote :)") and AMASSLOVE (trademark of Shenzhen Longhua New surface area Yemili GarmentFactory; i,000 reviews). These hats vary in blueprint and text, decorated with additional flags, or with subtly different typography, but they get the bespeak beyond. On November. ix, the AMASSLOVE hat was week'south tiptop seller in Amazon'southward "Men'due south Novelty Baseball game Caps" section.
Prototype
Despite winning in 2016, President Trump never fully accustomed the results of the ballot, fabricating claims almost voter fraud to account for his loss of the popular vote. He never stopped candidature, either. On the president'southward caput, the MAGA hat worked to bridge two images: Mr. Trump, the candidate, and Mr. Trump, the president.
Perched atop the actual caput of regime, the MAGA hat took on new meaning. It was still a mode to express support of the president, his policies and his orientation toward the globe, merely its power to provoke grew alongside the power of its all-time-known wearer.
The MAGA hat, of course, was never so simple as a way to limited a voting preference — it was embroidered with a historically freighted phrase and understood to suggest that America, under attack by external and internal enemies, had to be taken dorsum from them.
In January 2019, Robin Givhan of The Washington Mail described the hat's evolution as a symbol. "In the beginning, the MAGA hat had multiple meanings and nuance," she wrote. "Just the definition has evolved. The rosy nostalgia has turned specious and rank."
"The MAGA lid speaks to America'southward greatness with lies of omission and contortion," she continued. "To wear a MAGA lid is to wrap oneself in a Confederate flag." Charles Blow, an opinion columnist at The Times, wrote that what was one time Trump merch had go a visual stand-in for "Trumpism" — "a new iconography of white supremacy, white nationalist defiance and white cultural defense."
Their analysis was dismissed by many of the president's supporters as yet another slander — as an attempt to smear people who supported the president as neo-Confederates, when, in overwhelming numbers, they were just voting along party lines. Christine Rosen, of Commentary, characterized their columns as an "effort to demonize their opponents by casting Trump supporters as 'the other.'"
Fifty-fifty granting that criticism, and setting aside insinuations about ideological overlap, months later on, in a fresh political context, the comparisons fabricated past Ms. Givhan and Mr. Blow still pose precisely the right questions most what happens to political symbols after defeat.
Epitome
If particulars of the future of the MAGA hat are in doubt, that it has a future is all only assured. With the president's refusal to admit losing the election, expressions of support are now bound up with his denial, defiance and insistence that he has been wronged.
In 2015, the MAGA slogan was defended as a broad expression of yearning for a nonspecific by; after 2016, the particulars of that yearning became much harder to deny. In 2021, a MAGA hat, true to its slogan, might yet refer to a desire for restoration, only not of the vague "good onetime days" generations in the past, but of the four years immediately behind it. At that place are hints of the MAGA hat's future abroad, already, equally loosely continued right wing movements around the world have adopted it, or versions of information technology, agreement, correctly, that its slogan was never merely literal.
The MAGA hat of the future would be a symbol of a lost cause; a hope, or a threat, that a motion might rise over again; and, finally, an expression of an credo that sees whatsoever regime but ane run by its own every bit illegitimate but that would be defended, however implausibly, as a mere expression of support for fairness and security in elections.
Had there never been a MAGA lid, it would be difficult to come with an item better suited to the needs of the president and his most ardent supporters, tomorrow and in the years after, slogan and all. It's merchandise turned symbol of state now gear 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 a comforting option for the millions of people with MAGA hats at dwelling: to go along wearing them.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/style/election-maga-hat.html
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