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What Does the MAGA Lid Mean Now?
Millions of Americans put them on during President Trump'south first entrada. Will they e'er take them off?
What happens to campaign merch later the votes are counted?
Most ofttimes, 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 just considering they're a hurting to pare off.
Mostly, shirts and buttons languish in closets and drawers. Side by side cease: thrift store, and so the vintage store. Finally, they're collectible, even if only as ironic accessories. The afterlife of campaign merchandise is unusually literal, considering, after Ballot Day, these objects experience something like expiry.
All of this relies, though, on the campaign actually coming to an stop. What if it doesn't?
Epitome
From the earliest days of Donald J. Trump'due south 2022 campaign, it was clear that the red "Brand America Great Over again" hat was here to stay. Information technology was an unusual item from the showtime, promoting a slogan rather than a logo or a name, and frequently worn past the candidate himself. On Mr. Trump, the cap perched incongruously atop a laboriously manufactured prototype: expensive suit, expensive necktie, the face, the hair and and so, suddenly, siren red.
Most campaign merchandise simply inhabits a generic garment and leaves information technology 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'south for what they said — "Truth Over Lies," for instance — not the grade they took.
The MAGA hat, in dissimilarity, claimed a shape and a color. By 2016, scarlet hats of any variety drew double takes. In late 2019, the Trump campaign announced information technology was about to sell its millionth MAGA hat, merely the true count — including unauthorized Trump hats sold at rallies, in souvenir shops and around Washington, D.C. — is surely much college. These hats aren't and 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; pinnacle-rated Amazon review: "I'll be wearing mine to go vote :)") and AMASSLOVE (trademark of Shenzhen Longhua New expanse Yemili GarmentFactory; 1,000 reviews). These hats vary in design and text, decorated with additional flags, or with subtly different typography, only they get the point beyond. On November. nine, the AMASSLOVE hat was week'south summit seller in Amazon'due south "Men'south Novelty Baseball Caps" section.
Paradigm
Despite winning in 2016, President Trump never fully accepted the results of the ballot, fabricating claims about voter fraud to business relationship for his loss of the popular vote. He never stopped candidature, either. On the president's head, the MAGA hat worked to bridge ii images: Mr. Trump, the candidate, and Mr. Trump, the president.
Perched atop the bodily head of authorities, the MAGA hat took on new meaning. It was even so a way to express support of the president, his policies and his orientation toward the world, just its power to provoke grew alongside the ability of its best-known wearer.
The MAGA hat, of form, was never and so simple as a way to express 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 Post described the hat'south development equally a symbol. "In the beginning, the MAGA hat 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 habiliment 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 go 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'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 merely voting along political 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 bated insinuations virtually ideological overlap, months after, in a fresh political context, the comparisons made by Ms. Givhan and Mr. Blow still pose precisely the correct questions well-nigh what happens to political symbols after defeat.
Prototype
If particulars of the futurity of the MAGA hat are in incertitude, that information technology has a future is all only assured. With the president's refusal to acknowledge losing the election, expressions of support are now bound up with his deprival, disobedience 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 chapeau, truthful to its slogan, might still refer to a desire for restoration, only not of the vague "good former days" generations in the past, but of the 4 years immediately behind it. There are hints of the MAGA chapeau'south future abroad, already, as loosely connected right wing movements around the world have adopted it, or versions of it, agreement, correctly, that its slogan was never simply literal.
The MAGA lid of the time to come would be a symbol of a lost cause; a promise, or a threat, that a motion might ascent again; and, finally, an expression of an ideology that sees any authorities merely one run by its own equally illegitimate only that would be dedicated, even so implausibly, every bit 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 amend suited to the needs of the president and his nigh ardent supporters, tomorrow and in the years after, slogan and all. It'due south merchandise 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 selection 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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