Donald Trump’s strange, seemingly impromptu dance performance isn’t the only way his campaign has taken a Dadaist turn as of late—his online store has also started selling a piece of merch that simultaneously doubles as an arresting postmodern commentary on the nature of merch.
When I first saw the item, I wanted to share it with my colleagues, but I struggled to describe it: The Trump-Vance 2024 store calls it the “Little Red MAGA Hat,” but it’s not actually what that sounds like, which is a smaller, maybe kid-size version of Trump’s famous red hats. Rather, it’s a white baseball hat featuring an—embroidered, I assume—illustration of those hats. It is, in the same funny way the “Monster Mash” is technically a song about a different, unheard song/dance called the Monster Mash (look it up), not a MAGA hat but a hat that refers to the concept of MAGA hats. The blog Boing Boing put it perfectly: It’s a MAGA hat hat.
These hats are, I’m sorry to say, hilarious. I don’t like it either, but it’s true. The gimmick doesn’t work nearly as well in T-shirt form, which the campaign is also hawking, but never mind that. The existence of these hats is about the millionth reminder of how funny Trump is despite it all. He shouldn’t be. No right-thinking person wants to be laughing at such an evil, disgusting man. And yet, as the saying goes, we feel bad for our country, but this is tremendous content.
Still, the hats seem wholly out of place with the rest of the campaign’s merch. Did the ghost of René Magritte drop in to do this one thing? As funny as Trump is, he’s not usually clever, and these seem more like something a brainy comedian would bring out as a prop during a late-night show appearance than the blunt ugliness that usually characterizes the Trump campaign. The original MAGA hat is one of the most garish, unattractive objects ever manufactured, and it’s hard to believe that the same minds that gave us that could also give us this.
We might never know whose brainchild these hats were, but we can attempt to ponder what they might actually mean. The hats, with their hat-within-a-hat concept, create a layer of distance between the wearer and the ugliness of Trump’s politics—are they for the ironic Trump fan, the type that needs to tell themselves they’re better than the other Trump voters? In thinking about the hats, I was reminded of a moment in a recent New York magazine article about the campaign (the article is now controversial for other reasons) wherein Trump discusses a newly coined nickname for his opponent:
“Well, I have a name. You saw the new name?” I had not seen it. “Kamabla,” he said. His communications director, Steven Cheung, who had said almost nothing for 57 minutes, piped up to say it too. “Kamabla.” Trump nodded. He gave me an expectant look, but I was confused. He repeated it again. “Kamabla.”
As with “Kamabla,” I’m not sure anyone at Trump HQ would be able to actually explain why the MAGA hat hats are funny. As with so much of what they do, probably no one thought about it that much. Smaller MAGA hat on a hat. Kamabla. Immigrants eating dogs. Yeah, sure, whatever, let’s try it, maybe someone will buy it. It just so happens that, unlike Kamabla, the hats actually work. Can it really be explained? A broken clock is right twice a day; some spaghetti sticks to the wall. But maybe the hats also more revealing than even their originators realize.
The original MAGA hats date back to the 2016 presidential race, and the “Make America Great Again” slogan was about returning to some imagined version of an idyllic America. To the extent that that was ever a coherent idea, these hats deemphasize it. It’s no longer about making America great—now it’s all about recapturing the rush of 2016. Doesn’t it seem like the Trump campaign is nostalgic for those good old days, when they were an upstart, energetic operation whose candidate actually seemed to want to be there? Are these hats a tell that they wish it was eight years ago? Maybe they’re even an accidental tribute to an era they know is over, where the MAGA hat is sort of an angel over a heavenly white background: RIP, MAGA? We can only hope—and keep an eye out for the MAGA hat hat hat.
