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Trump Nach Indiana Make America Great Again Trump Nach Indiana Campaign

A crowd wearing MAGA hats watches as President Donald Trump delivers remarks during a 2018 Make America Great Again Rally in Wisconsin.
Credit... Tom Brenner for The New York Times

News Assay

Millions of Americans put them on during President Trump'due south start entrada. Will they e'er have them off?

What happens to entrada merch after the votes are counted?

Near often, unsold leftovers are donated to charities, recycled, or given to staff and volunteers as keepsakes. Optimistic candidates constrict 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 then," or simply considering they're a hurting to skin off.

By and large, shirts and buttons languish in closets and drawers. Next stop: thrift shop, so the vintage shop. Finally, they're collectible, even if only every bit ironic accessories. The afterlife of campaign trade is unusually literal, because, after Election Day, these objects experience something similar death.

All of this relies, though, on the entrada really coming to an end. What if it doesn't?

Paradigm

Donald Trump greets supporters at a campaign rally in Albuquerque, NM in 2016.
Credit... Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

From the earliest days of Donald J. Trump's 2016 campaign, it was clear that the ruby-red "Brand America Great Over again" hat was hither to stay. It was an unusual detail from the start, promoting a slogan rather than a logo or a name, and frequently worn by the candidate himself. On Mr. Trump, the cap perched incongruously atop a laboriously manufactured paradigm: expensive suit, expensive tie, the confront, the hair and then, suddenly, siren red.

About entrada 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 effectually 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 contrast, claimed a shape and a color. By 2016, carmine 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 office of an ongoing show and keep to be produced.

On Amazon, unofficial MAGA hats are sold by the yard by Chinese due east-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 become 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 chapeau was week's superlative seller in Amazon's "Men's Novelty Baseball Caps" section.

Image

Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times

Despite winning in 2016, President Trump never fully accepted the results of the election, fabricating claims near voter fraud to account for his loss of the popular vote. He never stopped campaigning, 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 hat took on new pregnant. Information technology was still a mode to express back up of the president, his policies and his orientation toward the earth, but its power to provoke grew alongside the power of its best-known wearer.

The MAGA hat, of course, was never and then simple every bit a way to limited 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 Mail service described the hat'south evolution as a symbol. "In the beginning, the MAGA hat had multiple meanings and nuance," she wrote. "Simply 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 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 disobedience and white cultural defense."

Their analysis was dismissed by many of the president'due south supporters as yet another slander — as an endeavour to smear people who supported the president as neo-Confederates, when, in overwhelming numbers, they were only voting along party lines. Christine Rosen, of Commentary, characterized their columns as an "endeavour to demonize their opponents by casting Trump supporters every bit 'the other.'"

Even granting that criticism, and setting aside insinuations about ideological overlap, months subsequently, in a fresh political context, the comparisons made by Ms. Givhan and Mr. Blow still pose precisely the right questions about what happens to political symbols after defeat.

Prototype

Credit... Joshua Roberts/Reuters

If particulars of the futurity of the MAGA chapeau are in doubt, that it has a future is all but bodacious. With the president's refusal to acknowledge losing the election, expressions of support are now spring 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 past; after 2016, the particulars of that yearning became much harder to deny. In 2021, a MAGA hat, true to its slogan, might notwithstanding 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 it. In that location are hints of the MAGA hat'southward future abroad, already, as loosely connected right wing movements around the world accept adopted it, or versions of it, understanding, correctly, that its slogan was never just literal.

The MAGA hat of the future would exist a symbol of a lost cause; a hope, or a threat, that a movement might rise again; and, finally, an expression of an ideology that sees whatsoever government but one run by its own as illegitimate just that would be defended, however implausibly, as a mere expression of back up for fairness and security in elections.

Had at that place never been a MAGA lid, it would be difficult to come upwardly with an detail better suited to the needs of the president and his most agog supporters, tomorrow and in the years after, slogan and all. Information technology'due south trade turned symbol of state now ready to fulfill its ultimate destiny as a commercial production. A president who never concedes, fifty-fifty if he steps aside, is telling a story that leaves open up a comforting option for the millions of people with MAGA hats at dwelling house: to keep wearing them.

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/style/election-maga-hat.html

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