Play on Make America Great Again Hat
News Analysis
What Does the MAGA Hat Hateful Now?
Millions of Americans put them on during President Trump's first campaign. Will they ever accept them off?
What happens to entrada merch after 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 circulation are converted overnight into memorabilia, tokens of victory or defeat. A few bumper stickers hang on to say "I told you and so," or just because they're a pain to peel off.
Mostly, shirts and buttons languish in closets and drawers. Next stop: thrift shop, then the vintage store. Finally, they're collectible, fifty-fifty if merely as ironic accessories. The afterlife of campaign trade is unusually literal, because, after Election Day, these objects experience something like expiry.
All of this relies, though, on the campaign really coming to an end. What if it doesn't?
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From the primeval days of Donald J. Trump's 2016 entrada, it was clear that the red "Make America Great Again" hat was here to stay. It was an unusual detail from the first, promoting a slogan rather than a logo or a proper name, and oft worn by the candidate himself. On Mr. Trump, the cap perched incongruously atop a laboriously manufactured paradigm: expensive suit, expensive tie, the face, the pilus and then, all of a sudden, siren red.
Nearly campaign merchandise merely 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 country, but to the extent they'll be remembered, it's for what they said — "Truth Over Lies," for instance — not the form they took.
The MAGA chapeau, in contrast, claimed a shape and a color. By 2016, ruddy hats of any variety drew double takes. In tardily 2019, the Trump entrada announced it was about to sell its millionth MAGA lid, but the truthful count — including unauthorized Trump hats sold at rallies, in gift shops and around Washington, D.C. — is surely much higher. These hats aren't so much souvenirs or keepsakes; they're function of an ongoing show and go along to exist produced.
On Amazon, unofficial MAGA hats are sold by the thousand by Chinese due east-commerce entrepreneurs, under brands such equally VPCOK (trademark of Shenzhenshi Nuobei Muying Yongpin Youxian Gongsi; meridian-rated Amazon review: "I'll exist wearing mine to go vote :)") and AMASSLOVE (trademark of Shenzhen Longhua New area Yemili GarmentFactory; 1,000 reviews). These hats vary in design and text, decorated with boosted flags, or with subtly different typography, but they get the point across. On Nov. 9, the AMASSLOVE hat was week'southward superlative seller in Amazon'due south "Men's Novelty Baseball Caps" section.
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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 pop vote. He never stopped candidature, either. On the president's head, the MAGA hat worked to bridge 2 images: Mr. Trump, the candidate, and Mr. Trump, the president.
Perched atop the actual head of authorities, the MAGA chapeau took on new significant. It was withal a way to limited support of the president, his policies and his orientation toward the world, just its power to provoke grew aslope the ability of its best-known wearer.
The MAGA hat, of form, was never so simple as a way to express a voting preference — information technology was embroidered with a historically freighted phrase and understood to suggest that America, under attack past external and internal enemies, had to be taken back from them.
In January 2019, Robin Givhan of The Washington Post described the lid's evolution as a symbol. "In the beginning, 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 chapeau speaks to America's greatness with lies of omission and contortion," she continued. "To wear a MAGA hat is to wrap oneself in a Amalgamated flag." Charles Blow, an opinion columnist at The Times, wrote that what was once Trump merch had get a visual stand-in for "Trumpism" — "a new iconography of white supremacy, white nationalist defiance and white cultural defense."
Their assay was dismissed by many of the president'southward supporters every bit 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 every bit an "effort to demonize their opponents past casting Trump supporters every bit 'the other.'"
Even granting that criticism, and setting bated insinuations near ideological overlap, months later, in a fresh political context, the comparisons made by Ms. Givhan and Mr. Blow still pose precisely the correct questions about what happens to political symbols after defeat.
Prototype
If particulars of the hereafter 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 support are now bound up with his deprival, defiance and insistence that he has been wronged.
In 2015, the MAGA slogan was defended as a wide expression of yearning for a nonspecific past; afterwards 2016, the particulars of that yearning became much harder to deny. In 2021, a MAGA hat, true to its slogan, might still refer to a desire for restoration, only not of the vague "proficient quondam days" generations in the past, only of the four years immediately behind it. There are hints of the MAGA chapeau'south future abroad, already, as loosely connected right wing movements around the world take adopted it, or versions of it, understanding, correctly, that its slogan was never simply literal.
The MAGA hat of the futurity would exist a symbol of a lost cause; a promise, or a threat, that a movement might rise over again; and, finally, an expression of an ideology that sees any regime only one run by its ain as illegitimate but that would be defended, all the same implausibly, as a mere expression of support for fairness and security in elections.
Had there never been a MAGA hat, it would be hard 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. Information technology's merchandise turned symbol of state at present set up to fulfill its ultimate destiny as 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 domicile: to continue wearing them.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/style/election-maga-hat.html
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