That's Some Bad Hat, Harry
Notes Toward a Cultural History of the MAGA Hat
Hi! I’m taking a brief pause from walking through the DAD / POP mixtape because this idea was burning a hole in my pocket. So I’m going to close-read some hats for a minute, okay?
What does conservative pop culture look like? Ana Maria Cox recently gave us a great deep dive into the ways that big media institutions have caved to conservative forces in the Trump era, and the way that right-wing creators have made inroads into what have previously been — by default! — liberal spaces. Jonathan Keeperman, in an extremely punchable NYT interview with Ross Douthat, was less eager to trumpet the idea of cultural capture, asserting that conservatives have developed a counterculture in response to years of progressive dominance in media spheres. However you want to put it, you can feel it. The first Trump term was an experience of a culture constantly, theatrically rejecting Trumpism like a foreign organ; this time it’s different. Mainstream pop culture isn’t resisting as hard as it used to. Mainstream media organs are nicer, despite Trump’s actions being more aggressive, more disruptive, more overtly provocative even. And I, at least, have a general sense that pop culture isn’t just making way for Trump, it’s adapting to him, working with what he’s giving it.
But this didn’t happen overnight. U.S. pop culture has been building and reshaping toward this. And the way I know is that I’ve been paying attention to the hats.
Everybody knows about the MAGA hat. It’s red. It says what it says on it. The content of the MAGA hat is obvious. It’s a team hat, a cult uniform, a panting, sniveling dare for you to say something about it. It is, for better or worse, iconic at this point, the single image or object that exemplifies this movement, the illustration that will appear in future history books so long as Elon Musk hasn’t had Grok “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge” by then. But its iconicity is not just limited to its color and its catchphrase. The FORM of this hat matters, in part because it’s such a telling one.
When Donald Trump first donned the MAGA cap in 2015, it was a simple “Golfer” hat, thus named because it’s just the kind of hat you would wear golfing in the 1980s. (FWIW, the first time he wore one, it was actually a white and blue colorway, not the red and white that would become its signature.) Trump is an 80s guy, through and through, and he’s a golfer — the kind of golfer who tells a raunchy joke on the first tee, but, by the time you’re at the hot dog cart, he’s said three or four things about women that are so casually chilling, you’ll never forget you heard them — so the hat was a period-specific encapsulation of the man’s vibe.
A golfer hat has a soft crown, meaning there’s no hard structuring material underneath it, outside of a short, stiff, mesh flap behind the front panel, to keep it upright and collect sweat. (This hat reads itself.) The hat has five panels — a classic baseball hat usually has six, of equal size — meaning that the front panel stretches all the way across the front of the hat. To give it shape, that panel is pinched at the top. Often, there’s a fabric rope strung across a golfer hat where the front panel means the brim. Overall, what happens is that these hats schlump. The pinched point at the top of the front panel holds up the slouching fabric around it like an old, slack circus tent. It’s a sloppy-ass hat.
When Trump first debuted this version, part of what was remarkable about it was how unfashionable it was. This was not a cool hat. The 2010s were dominated by two main hat styles. The first was the classic New Era 59FIFTY fitted. The 59FIFTY is the on-field hat of Major League Baseball. It has six panels, a high crown, a flat brim, and a structured silhouette, with hard plastic buckram shaping the front panels. You might see it worn with the brim still flat and the sticker still on the brim; you might see it worn down, the brim curved over time to the wearer’s specification, perhaps the buckram even torn out from behind the front panel to soften its shape. It’s the hat most associated with hip hop and sneaker culture — it rose in prominence as streetwear fashion in the 1990s — but it’s also the signature style of New Era, which began making the hat, in essentially this exact shape and style, in 1954.
The other popular style, which had been ascendant for some time, is the “dad hat.” By way of contrast, the dad hat has a soft crown, unstructured, and a pre-curved brim. It often has a vintage, weathered look, as its soft structure conforms exactly to the wearer’s head, and the pre-curved brim implies a kind of lived-in aesthetic. You used to be able to buy hats in this style that were literally torn and frayed around the edges. Dads, obviously, wear hats like this, but so do/did frat guys and the like. In the mid-teens, they were reclaimed a bit by high fashion: Kanye West (pre-lapsarian) was wearing them everywhere, Balenciaga started making $400 dad hats of their own.
So Trump in 2015, either accidentally or on purpose, chose a particularly outmoded hat to turn into his personal crown. All the same, it caught fire, and his supporters began wearing these terrible-looking caps everywhere.
But, somewhere in there, something started happening. Very specifically, the New Era 9FORTY A-Frame hat began to rise. Now, I’ve tried to research this as much as I could. I’ve combed through the hathead communities on Reddit and scoured the internet to figure out when New Era introduced this specific hat model, but to no avail. What I know for sure that is that, whether it was a new model introduced in the midst of the Trump era, or it was an existing style, it started simmering to the surface during the past decade, and it is now one of the most prominent — and most prominently advertised — styles in New Era’s catalogue. But it was not even always available on New Era’s site. In fact, when I started coming across it, this style of hat proliferated mostly on streetwear sites like Culture Kings, where the A-Frame landing page states, “Nothing hits harder than a New Era 9FORTY A-Frame cap. With a structured crown and curved brim, these A-frame hats serve comfort, style, and certified street cred—all in one.” What is a 9FORTY A-frame? Very simply: it’s a MAGA hat with plausible deniability.
What the A-frame does is take the basic shape and style of the MAGA golfer and give it a makeover. Instead of the schlumpy front panel, it’s got a structured buckram backing, but the signature pinch is still there, just sharp and beaklike now. It has snaps in the back, and a notably high crown. And, what’s more, the Trump campaign adopted this sleeker styling itself. After the initial run, they abandoned the lowly golfer. The 2020 campaign hats were essentially New Era 9FORTY knock-offs, and the 2024 campaign hats are like a hallucination of them — they are hats at the same size and scale of a derisive political cartoon. The crowns are comically high, the pinches peaking into the sky. A person could hide a Ratatouille in there. Maybe some of them are. You’ll see this especially in images of Elon Musk in the Oval Office, wearing the kind of goth, ten-gallon ball cap Count Orlok might wear to a Yankee game.
So, the story here is that Trump’s shitty-looking MAGA hat in 2015 remained a signifier of the worst aspects of American social and political life, while, at the same time, that form of hat — if not its content — began to gain traction in areas of American culture that would have outright rejected the loathsome association. When Trump 2020 did its redesign, the connection became harder to ignore. But the A-frames were already peaking.
This is all speculative, of course, but something happened recently that made me think that the cross-penetration between the MAGA movement and hat design in the U.S. is real. Since the start of the 2024 presidential campaign, New Era has debuted a new few new A-frame designs. One, released last year, is the 59FIFTY A-frame, a revision of their classic fitted hat silhouette but with a pinched A-frame front panel. There really isn’t any clearer a metaphor for the way that this movement has seeped into the cultural groundwater than a hundred-year old company that is known only for making a product that symbolizes the Great American Pastime and that is beloved by wide swaths of the American public, changing its design after seventy years to make it just a little bit more Trumpy.
To be clear, I don’t think these hats are inherently evil or even that there’s anything wrong with wearing them. The hat I most associate with my beloved grandfather — my personal hat icon — is a classic golfer with a rope across the front. My finger is currently hovering over the “Add to Cart” button for a camo-and-orange 9FORTY A-frame WNBA hat that I very much desire. You should wear the hat that fits your head shape! Wear the hat that makes you happy! The point is that the divider that we might imagine to have been built between pop culture spaces and the MAGA movement has either crumbled or was never really there in the first place. And it’s not just evangelical film studios and Taylor Sheridan TV shows. It’s been infrastructure week for the past decade, as elements of this massive movement have been building up strength in the places where we least expect them. When a thing like this becomes visible, check to see how long it had been there before you noticed. Moreover, ask what that might mean about the idea that this ideology can be laughed out of the room, stigmatized until it slinks away in shame.
I wrote this post this week because I saw a picture of the president in the Situation Room, monitoring a War in Iran that somehow jailbroke out of Sean Hannity and Tom Cotton’s fanfic blog and became real. In the picture, he’s wearing maybe the tallest A-frame MAGA hat I’ve ever seen. As that man violently wreaks this vulgarity upon Los Angeles and Tehran, the world moves into a new era shaped by his vanity, his venality, his incuriosity, his horrible style. If the hat fits, wear it.
Stuff I Wrote
Since the last newsletter, I wrote for The New Republic about The Studio — a show I didn’t care for as much as my fellow critics — and The Rehearsal — a show, turns out, I care quite a lot about. I’ll have some new material on The Bear, the return of Lena Dunham, and the greatest sports league on the planet (the WNBA) out soon!
Recommendations
The title of this post is a line from my favorite movie, Jaws, which turned fifty, apparently, this month. I wrote a little thread about my favorite part of it here, but the real recommendation is just that you should watch Jaws. It kicks ass.
Maybe because I just wrote several hundred words about the hat Donald Trump wears, I think I was a little more sympathetic than most toward this extremely attentive, subtly withering close reading of that guy’s new official presidential portrait.
Sam Anderson’s book Boom Town is one of my favorite non-fiction books, and he revisited its organizing subject — the Oklahoma City Thunder — as they hurtled toward the NBA finals this weekend.
True fans of this newsletter — Chicken Tenders — will know that there was a time in my life when I was very afraid of UFOs. I managed to talk myself down by reading skeptical journalists and, especially, aviation experts. So it was with great joy that I read this GRIPPING AND INSANE report that essentially proves all of their explanations correct.
Lauren Michele Jackson wrote this outlandishly locked-in essay about the use and misuse of “POV” in pop culture. She sets the bar, as always.
This essay, by Albert Burneko, about AI and the NYT tech columnist, is maybe the best single piece of criticism I’ve read this year.
I haven’t made one yet, but this smitten kitchen recipe for “The Red and Black” cocktail is right up my alley.
We’re gonna need a bigger boat,
Phil.