changed. This year, the Biden-Harris cam-
paign 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 hat, in contrast, claimed a
shape and a color. By 2016, red hats of any
variety drew double takes. In late 2019, the
Trump campaign 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 — is surely much higher. These
hats aren’t so much souvenirs or keep-
sakes; 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-com-
merce entrepreneurs, under brands such as
VPCOK (trademark of Shenzhenshi Nuobei
Muying Yongpin Youxian Gongsi; top-rated
Amazon review: “I’ll be wearing mine to go
vote :)”) and AMASSLOVE (trademark of
Shenzhen Longhua New area Yemili Gar-
mentFactory; 1,000 reviews). These hats
vary in design and text, decorated with ad-
ditional flags, or with subtly different typog-
raphy, but they get the point across. On
Monday, the AMASSLOVE hat was the
week’s top seller in Amazon’s “Men’s Nov-
elty Baseball Caps” section.
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, ei-
ther. On the president’s head, the MAGA hat
worked to bridge two images: Mr. Trump,the candidate, and Mr. Trump, the presi-
dent.
Perched atop the actual head of govern-
ment, 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 world, but its power to provoke
grew alongside the power of its best-known
wearer.
The MAGA hat, of course, was never so
simple as a way to express a voting prefer-
ence — it was embroidered with a histori-
cally freighted phrase and understood to
suggest that America, under attack by ex-
ternal and internal enemies, had to be taken
back from them.
In January 2019, Robin Givhan of The
Washington Post described the hat’s evolu-
tion as a symbol. “In the beginning, the
MAGA hat had multiple meanings and nu-ance,” she wrote. “But the definition has
evolved. The rosy nostalgia has turned spe-
cious and rank.”
“The MAGA hat speaks to America’s
greatness with lies of omission and contor-
tion,” she continued. “To wear a MAGA hat
is to wrap oneself in a Confederate flag.”
Charles Blow, an opinion columnist at The
New York Times, wrote that what was once
Trump merchandise had become a visual
stand-in for “Trumpism” — “a new iconog-
raphy of white supremacy, white nationalist
defiance and white cultural defense.”
Their analysis 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-Con-
federates, when, in overwhelming num-
bers, they were just voting along 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 over-
lap, months later, in a fresh political context,
the comparisons made by Ms. Givhan and
Mr. Blow still pose precisely the right ques-
tions about what happens to political sym-
bols after defeat.
If particulars of the future of the MAGA
hat are in doubt, that it has a future is all but
assured. With the president’s refusal to ac-
knowledge losing the election, expressions
of support are now bound 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 non-
specific past; after 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 “good old days” gener-
ations in the past, but of the four years im-
mediately behind it. There are hints of the
MAGA hat’s future abroad, already, as
loosely connected right wing movements
around the world have adopted it, or ver-
sions 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 movement might rise again; and, fi-
nally, an expression of an ideology that sees
any government but one run by its own as
illegitimate but that would be defended,
however implausibly, as a mere expression
of support for fairness and security in elec-
tions.
Had there never been a MAGA hat, it
would be hard to come up with an item bet-
ter suited to the needs of the president and
his most ardent supporters, tomorrow and
in the years after, slogan and all. It’s mer-
chandise turned symbol of state now ready
to fulfill its ultimate destiny as a commer-
cial product. A president who never con-
cedes, 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.A Campaign Cap
And Its Future
TOM BRENNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESClockwise from top: Make
America Great Again caps front
and center at a Trump rally in
Wisconsin in 2018; the crowd at
the Conservative Political
Action Conference in February
2020; President Trump
greeting supporters at a rally in
Albuquerque in 2016.By JOHN HERRMANWill the MAGA hat become a symbol
of a lost cause, or of hope?
STEPHEN CROWLEY/THE NEW YORK TIMES JOSHUA ROBERTS/REUTERSWhat happens to campaign merch after the
votes are counted?
Most often, unsold leftovers are donated
to charities, recycled or given to staff mem-
bers and volunteers as keepsakes. Opti-
mistic candidates tuck away excess inven-
tory for possible reuse. Items already in cir-
culation are converted overnight into mem-
orabilia, tokens of victory or defeat. A few
bumper stickers hang on to say, “I told you
so,” or just because they’re a pain to peel off.
Mostly, shirts and buttons languish in
closets and drawers. Next stop: thrift store,
then the vintage store. Finally, they’re col-
lectible, even if only as ironic accessories.
The afterlife of campaign merchandise is
unusually literal, because, 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 does-
n’t?
From the earliest days of Donald J.
Trump’s 2016 campaign, it was clear that
the red “Make America Great Again” hat
was here to stay. It was an unusual item
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 labori-
ously manufactured image: expensive suit,
expensive tie, the face, the hair and then,
suddenly, siren red.
Most campaign merchandise simply in-
habits a generic garment and leaves it un-
4 ST + THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020Six months into his bid for the presidency,
Joseph R. Biden Jr. made his position on
pets abundantly clear.
“Some Americans celebrate #National-
CatDay, some celebrate #NationalDogDay,”
he wrote in a tweet. “President Trump cele-
brates neither. It says a lot. It’s time we put a
pet back in the White House.”
In January, when President-elect Biden
moves into the White House, a bit of nor-
malcy will be restored to the nation’s highest
office: He and his wife, Jill Biden, are ex-
pected to be joined by their two German
shepherds, Champ, 12, and Major, 2.
The news has been applauded by dog
owners and especially those who support
animal adoption over commercial breeding.
A decade after purchasing Champ from a
breeder in Pennsylvania, a move criticized
by some animal rights organizations, the Bi-
dens adopted Major in 2018 through the Del-
aware Humane Association; he will make
history in January as the first shelter dog to
take up residence in the White House.
Several animal welfare agencies posted
about the news, including the Delaware Hu-
mane Association, which captioned a photo
of Major: “First Dog Elect.”
Patrick Carroll, the executive director of
the Delaware Humane Association, said
Major “shows the real possibilities for what
could happen for all the great dogs who need
homes out there.”
Mr. Carroll, 54, recalled the day Mr. Biden
adopted Major in 2018. He said that Mr. Bi-
den was nominally in a hurry, but that he
ended up sticking around the shelter for
more than an hour, telling stories and taking
selfies with staffers. “He was very kind and
engaging, as he always is,” he said.
Across social media, dog lovers shared
their excitement about the return of pets to
the White House. WeRateDogs, the inter-
net’s definitive source for canine reviews,
which rates pooches by photo submission,
said of the soon-to-be first dogs: “Both 14/10
would be an honor to pet.”
Matt Nelson, 24, the creator of WeRate-
Dogs, said the Biden campaign had pro-
vided photos for the post about Champ and
Major. “It kind of was a submission, but it
wasn’t like Joe Biden was in our DMs,” he
said.
The tradition of presidential pet owner-
ship dates back to George Washington and
has been carried on by 30 of the presidents.
Mr. Trump was the first president in more
than a century without such a companion, a
fact that critics (and supporters) seized on
at several points over the last four years,
noting the potential for a pet to benefit one’s
health and image.
In September, a group called Dog Lovers
for Joe released a 30-second ad featuring
images of Republicans and Democrats —
Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton,
George W. Bush and Barack Obama — em-
bracing their dogs. The video urged viewers
to “choose your humans wisely.”
Rob Schwartz, the chief executive of the
agency TBWA/Chiat/Day New York and a
creator of the ad, said the idea came to him
after a consultative call with the Biden cam-
paign about its messaging. Independent
from the campaign and his agency, he
wanted to hammer home the common
ground Mr. Biden shared with much of the
electorate. Mr. Schwartz, 55, found that
nearly 70 percent of American homes in-
clude dogs and hoped that his ad would ap-
peal to both the undecided voter and the
“gun-toting red stater.”
Mr. Carroll, of the Delaware Humane As-
sociation, said that despite notions about
the bipartisanship dogs can inspire, the an-
nouncement of the new White House dogs
had drawn scrutiny. “We did a simple post
on our Facebook page, and we’ve gottensome very negative comments,” he said.
“We recognize that the country is very di-
vided.”
At the same time, “the power of dogs on
the internet is recognized by everyone,”
said Mr. Nelson, of WeRateDogs. With the
rise of the web and social media, presiden-
tial pets have produced goofy and occasion-
ally viral imagery, and become stars in their
own right. In 2002, George W. Bush cast his
Scottish terrier Barney as the star of what
would become an annual White House
Christmas video. Mr. Obama’s Portuguese
water dog Bo featured prominently in his
second campaign.
“People look at a whole constellation of
attributes when they vote for president,”
Mark McKinnon, a Bush campaign adviser,
told The Washington Post in 2012.
“Pet lover may not be high on the list,” headded, “but it’s on the list.”
Still, Mr. Trump has been dismissive of
the idea that he should have a pet. “How
would I look walking a dog on the White
House lawn?” he told his supporters at a
rally in El Paso in 2019. He has also fre-
quently treated the word “dog” as a slur, us-
ing it to disparage women for their looks
and eligibility as partners, and men for their
weakness.
During his campaign, Mr. Biden and his
team made direct appeals to pet lovers with
merch (like a “No Meowlarkey” cat collar)
and social media posts insistent on the im-
portance of presidential pets.
Mr. Trump’s merch shop, for its part, does
sell MAGA dog collars and leashes.
Meanwhile, at RepublicanDogs.com,
there are some deep discounts on Trump
bandannas.Paw Prints, Once Again, on the Road to the White House
Above, President-elect Joseph
R. Biden Jr. adopted Major in
2018 through the Delaware
Humane Association. He will
be the first shelter dog to live
in the White House. Champ, 12,
right, the Bidens’ other
German shepherd, who came
from a breeder, will also be
taking up residence at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue, which
has been noticeably pet-free
under President Trump.WIN McNAMEE/GETTY IMAGESBy BONNIE WERTHEIMThe tradition of presidential pet
ownership dates back to Washington.
STEPHANIE GOMEZ/DELAWARE HUMANE ASSOCIATION, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS