The MAGA Hat and the Gun
A joyous future to be realized through violence
This is the final installment of essays “from the Lucid archive.” I will now go back to regular posting. Expect an essay in your inbox Wednesday or Thursday on Trump and MAGA threats to elected officials, including, now, the sitting U.S. President.
As an anticipation, here is a brief video I made. It has 1 million views on Twitter/X in 24 hours. We need to call out these threats, but also explain the context for such images and the political goals their creators share.
This essay from Oct. 2021 helps us understand how we got to this point. I hope you find it helpful.
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Perhaps it was always going to come down to this. A MAGA hat and a gun. Two emblems of Trumpism, a movement fueled by capitalist glamour and thuggery, the former providing cover for the latter, as in this tableau.
Trump continues a century of authoritarian tradition in using marketing strategies to create a new sacred community. He gives his grassroots followers a tribal identity and a low-cost way to wear it proudly (the MAGA hat), turning them into walking brand ambassadors. The hat gives devotees a personal connection to him. They might not be able to afford his bespoke Brioni suits, but they share the same headgear.
"He was selling Trump, but he could have been selling sneakers," said a rival strategist of Trump's digital media director, Brad Parscale, and the e-commerce model the campaign used to get Trump into office.
The MAGA hat draws them in, but the gun keeps them there. Macho lawlessness was always the root of Trump's appeal. Being encouraged by the leader to transgress (the truth, “political correctness,” the rule of law, taboos against beating up your neighbor) was and remains a large part of the thrill of being a Trump follower.
The gun peeks out from the hat because violence is built into Trump's model of politics, which preaches that some must be harmed, or at least threatened into silence, or "locked up," so that the glory of the true nation may come to fruition.
The gun, already the symbol of systematic government repression of people of color, stands for the rights of arms-bearing civilians to create and police the new national community. Mandel may be a former Marine, but the gun he depicts is presumably private issue. Weapons already figure in a vision of political change, embodied in the Jan. 6 coup attempt, that depends on force and extralegal measures.
Authoritarians always need a veneer of respectability to keep financial and other elites on board and let people think, "It's not that bad; it's not that serious." That's the function of the MAGA hat. Yet there is nothing harmless about the violence committed by those who wear those hats, who include many who breached the Capitol. MAGA hats may refer to a joyous Trumpian future, but violence is the way that future is likely to be realized.
Millions of guns and a fanatical cult of toxic, brittle masculinity. What could go wrong?
I thought the hat was just to hide the lobotomy scars. It's a symbol too?