Is Buying a Make America Great Again Hat a Campaign Contribution

How the Trump hat became an icon

Updated 1933 GMT (0333 HKT) Feb 17, 2017

Washington (CNN)They were everywhere on Inauguration Day.

Bright red hats emblazoned with the words "Brand America Cracking Again" dominated the crowd celebrating in front of the Capitol. The hats were a powerful reminder of the dramatic change in ability near to unfold in Washington and became prized possessions for some of Trump's supporters.

Mark Stroman bought v hats from a street vendor for friends back domicile in Los Angeles, acknowledging the political divide the apparel represented.

"I remember that they brought some divisiveness," Stroman said. "They made a great split between Democrats and Republicans just I remember they fabricated people pay attention, they fabricated people wake up."

Entrada swag is easy to dismiss, only Trump'due south chapeau captured how his candidacy disrupted and divided the land. Like many things in Trump'south campaign, it's hard to conclude there was a g strategy that led to its success. But its connexion with voters -- for skillful or bad -- is undeniable.

Here's the story of how the hat became one of the most powerful symbols in modern American politics.

Owning a slogan

There were no marketing experts or design research involved in the initial idea for the hat, according to former campaign managing director Corey Lewandowski.

"I think somebody actually sent us a sample," Lewandowski told CNN. "They brought that sample to Donald Trump and he said, 'I like it, let's tweak this, let's practice information technology differently.'"

Lewandowski said they tried out dissimilar prototypes, different size fonts and styles before they landed on a keeper. Afterwards that, the hats were kept on Trump's plane at all times.

It was a little more a month afterward he appear his candidacy that Trump first donned the chapeau in public at a entrada event. When he made a much-publicized trip to Laredo, Texas, in July 2015 to visit the U.s.a.-Mexico border, the hot weather necessitated a more than casual look than his usual suit and tie.

"Simply for the sweat factor and other things, he chose to wear the lid," Lewandowski said.

At the time, Trump was caught up in a tornado of controversy, from questioning Sen. John McCain's status equally a war hero to speculation virtually running as a third-party candidate and a Border Patrol wedlock bankroll out of the visit at the last moment.

A beat out of reporters waited for Trump in the small concluding of the airport when Trump's plane touched downward.

"He came around the corner and we all went, 'Oh!,' CNN's Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash, who covered the event, remembered. "I actually recollect it vividly because it was like, 'Oh, of course, he'due south the chief marketer. Why wouldn't he put information technology on a hat?'"

Trump briefly visited the border, and talked to the cameras three separate times, belongings along on his signature issue of immigration. In every shot, his brand was impossible to miss.

Bash was too surprised to notice Trump was wearing white golf shoes, eliciting a "crunch crunch" noise as he walked out to a podium.

The lid itself may have been a fluke, but the slogan had a deeper history with Trump.

He started using the phrase as far back as 2011. It took on new meaning for Trump, however, in the wake of Mitt Romney's defeat in 2012. In both manner and substance, Trump felt Romney failed to project a positive vision of American forcefulness. Just six days after that election, Trump signed paperwork to trademark the phrase "Make America Great Again."

"He was in that chair -- that iconic chair he has in his role on the 26th floor of Trump Tower -- and he looked up and he said, 'My slogan is going to be Make American Keen Over again,'" Sam Nunberg, a former campaign aide who helped lay the background for Trump'south run, told CNN. "He looked upward at the ceiling with a smirk on his face, and he said, 'And watch, everybody'southward going to beloved it.' He was correct."

Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton, criticized the slogan as harkening dorsum to an abstract time in American history, calling information technology a "barbarous fantasy." The phrase has been used in the past past Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.Westward. Bush and even Clinton'south husband, Bill Clinton.

But in the history books, the slogan will vest to Trump.

Trademark applications typically accept a long time to process. Trump didn't receive the "Brand America Bang-up Again" trademark until July 2015, just in time for the trip to Laredo.

Disruptive technology

"It'south just a disruptive technology," Lewandowski told CNN of the entrada hats. "People who weren't involved in politics, that didn't have a political background, wanted to show their support for something different and their way to practice that was to purchase hats."

The hats are sold in a range of colors, but Trump has shown an analogousness for the carmine hat, as well as the white hat and a camo-fashion hat with orange font.

Trump was struck past the ubiquity of the hats, from rallies in rural America to formal GOP donor dinners, Lewandowski says. And yet, for all its resonance with supporters, the blueprint most seemed similar an reconsideration.

"It was united nations-designed," Lindsey Ballant, a designer and adjunct professor at the Maryland College of Fine art, told CNN. "It didn't represent what 1 thinks of when you retrieve of traditional politics in terms of visual messaging, and that's substantially what Trump was as well."

The type is default, Times New Roman, the colour design is bones, and the style, sitting oddly high on the head with a slender rope stretching beyond the front end, matches the hats Trump has long worn on his golf courses.

"In contrast, Hillary'southward entrada was incredibly thought out. It was elaborate. At that place was a whole system driven around the simplicity and the beauty of the logo marker," Ballant says of Trump's opponent's campaign.

Trump's campaign knew they wanted to capitalize on the popularity of the hat, spending more than $2.viii million on hats from Los Angeles-based company Cali-fame, even every bit political operatives mocked them.

"Information technology invited attacks from the left in a way that fit right into what I remember the Trump campaign and the Trump organisation wanted, which is a clash of those two political civilizations that they believed worked in their favor," Republican strategist and CNN contributor Kevin Madden said.

Lewandowski said it wasn't easy to find a US company to produce the hats. They sell for $20-$30 and cheaper knock-offs from countries like China and Bangladesh are mutual.

"Mr. Trump signs a lot of hats and he knows the difference," Lewandowsi told CNN. "He'd say to me, 'Yous know, out of 10 hats I signed, eight of them are one of the knock-offs.' He's like, 'How practise we get those guys?'"

Cali-fame produces the hats now sold on Trump's website, and the ones seen on his caput, but Trump's campaign likewise bought some hats from companies like Ace Specialties LLC and Maxim Advertising, according to finance reports.

If one wanders into the small-scale store in the basement of Trump Belfry, at that place is a corner devoted to campaign swag, featuring the classic hat as well as new versions unveiled after the ballot. The cashier there is conscientious to turn away whatsoever potential buyers who are not U.s. citizens, as a purchase of the hat is considered a campaign contribution for Trump's re-election.

The hats are a physical connectedness between Trump and many of his rural and working class supporters, but they also continue to exist a target for anti-Trump sentiment, from the many parodies of the chapeau, to protesters burning 1 at the inauguration.

No matter what emotion it inspires, the hat, once described by The New York Times as an "ironic summer accompaniment," has cemented its place in history. Both a crimson and white chapeau saturday about the stage, enclosed in drinking glass, at Trump'south election dark party.

"If I were always going to pattern a Trump presidential library, and somebody said what's the antiquity y'all most want, I would say the original hat of Donald Trump'south under glass," presidential Douglas Brinkley told CNN. "The whole campaign can be summed up in his collected Twitters, and that ball cap."

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Source: https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/17/politics/donald-trump-make-america-great-again-iconic-hat/index.html