Cultural Capitulation | Defector

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This post was originally published on the author’s Substack on June 24. It has been republished here in conjunction with Bills Week.

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 meets 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.

A red hat with a white p on it
A New Era 59Fifty fitted cap.

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.

A red hat with a white letter on it
A New Era 9TWENTY Core Classic, or, a “dad hat.”

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 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.

A red hat with a white letter on it
The New Era 9FORTY A-frame cap.

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. 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. 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 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 70 years to make it just a little bit more Trumpy.

The New Era 59FIFTY A-frame fitted cap.

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. 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.

A few weeks ago, I saw a picture of the president in the Situation Room, monitoring a War in Iran, wearing an A-frame MAGA hat so tall he could have been hiding a neo-conservative Ratatouille under there. In a way, he was. I’ve seen Kristi Noem waltzing around the “Alligator Alcatraz” concentration camp in a tall white and gold A-frame varietal. As that man and his lieutenants violently wreak their vulgarity upon Los Angeles and Florida 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.

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