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News Analysis
What Does the MAGA Hat Mean Now?
Millions of Americans put them on during President Trump's offset campaign. Will they ever accept them off?
A crowd wearing MAGA hats watches equally President Donald Trump delivers remarks during a 2022 Make America Cracking Again Rally in Wisconsin. Credit... Tom Brenner for The New York Times
What happens to entrada merch after the votes are counted?
Most oft, 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 then," or just because they're a hurting to peel off.
By and large, shirts and buttons languish in closets and drawers. Next stop: austerity store, so the vintage store. Finally, they're collectible, even if only every bit ironic accessories. The afterlife of campaign merchandise is unusually literal, considering, after Election Day, these objects experience something like death.
All of this relies, though, on the campaign actually coming to an end. What if it doesn't?
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From the primeval days of Donald J. Trump'southward 2022 entrada, information technology was clear that the red "Brand America Neat Again" lid was here to stay. It was an unusual detail from the outset, promoting a slogan rather than a logo or a name, and ofttimes worn past the candidate himself. On Mr. Trump, the cap perched incongruously atop a laboriously manufactured epitome: expensive adjust, expensive necktie, the confront, the hair then, suddenly, siren red.
Nearly campaign merchandise simply 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, only 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 hat, in dissimilarity, claimed a shape and a color. By 2016, red hats of whatever multifariousness drew double takes. In late 2019, the Trump entrada announced it 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 so much souvenirs or keepsakes; they're part of an ongoing show and go on to be produced.
On Amazon, unofficial MAGA hats are sold past the grand by Chinese e-commerce entrepreneurs, nether brands such as VPCOK (trademark of Shenzhenshi Nuobei Muying Yongpin Youxian Gongsi; top-rated Amazon review: "I'll exist wearing mine to get vote :)") and AMASSLOVE (trademark of Shenzhen Longhua New area Yemili GarmentFactory; 1,000 reviews). These hats vary in design and text, busy with additional flags, or with subtly different typography, only they go the signal beyond. On Nov. 9, the AMASSLOVE hat was week'south top seller in Amazon's "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 popular vote. He never stopped campaigning, either. On the president'due south head, the MAGA hat worked to bridge two images: Mr. Trump, the candidate, and Mr. Trump, the president.
Perched atop the actual head of government, the MAGA hat took on new meaning. It was still a way to express support of the president, his policies and his orientation toward the globe, but its ability to provoke grew alongside the power of its best-known wearer.
The MAGA hat, of course, was never then simple as a mode to express a voting preference — it was embroidered with a historically freighted phrase and understood to suggest that America, under set on past external and internal enemies, had to be taken back from them.
In January 2019, Robin Givhan of The Washington Postal service described the lid'south evolution as a symbol. "In the beginning, the MAGA lid had multiple meanings and dash," 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 wear a MAGA hat is to wrap oneself in a Amalgamated flag." Charles Accident, an opinion columnist at The Times, wrote that what was once Trump merch had become a visual stand up-in for "Trumpism" — "a new iconography of white supremacy, white nationalist disobedience and white cultural defense."
Their analysis was dismissed by many of the president's supporters every bit even so another slander — equally an attempt to smear people who supported the president as neo-Confederates, when, in overwhelming numbers, they were simply voting forth party lines. Christine Rosen, of Commentary, characterized their columns as an "effort to demonize their opponents by casting Trump supporters as 'the other.'"
Even granting that criticism, and setting aside insinuations about ideological overlap, months later, in a fresh political context, the comparisons fabricated by Ms. Givhan and Mr. Blow still pose precisely the right questions about what happens to political symbols after defeat.
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If particulars of the future of the MAGA lid are in dubiety, that it has a future is all but assured. With the president's refusal to admit losing the election, expressions of support are at present bound upwards 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 by; after 2016, the particulars of that yearning became much harder to deny. In 2021, a MAGA hat, truthful to its slogan, might even so refer to a desire for restoration, only not of the vague "good old days" generations in the past, but of the four years immediately behind information technology. There are hints of the MAGA lid'southward future abroad, already, equally loosely connected right wing movements around the world have adopted information technology, or versions of it, understanding, 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 motility might rise again; and, finally, an expression of an ideology that sees any government but one run by its ain equally illegitimate simply that would exist defended, still 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 upward with an item meliorate suited to the needs of the president and his most ardent supporters, tomorrow and in the years subsequently, slogan and all. It's trade turned symbol of state now ready 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 home: to keep wearing them.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/style/election-maga-hat.html
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