What — And I Cannot Stress This Enough — In The World Is “Blue MAGA”?

If you woke up on Friday morning to an embarrassing display of MAGA hats all over your Twitter feed, you’re not alone. After four years of a far right cult of personality around U.S. President Donald Trump and his red “Make America Great Again” hats, it would appear that some Democrats are prepared to answer back. Enter: Blue MAGA.

Unfortunately, most of us never signed up for a lifetime of hats with terrible slogans, shifting from red to blue every four years. But in the spirit of the blue wave that some people believe is here to save them from Trumpism, those blue hats carry a different, and somehow equally-cringey message: Made America Great Already. 

The hats started making the rounds on Twitter on Thursday evening, after the account “Biden Harris Hats” shared several photos of people wearing the blue "MAGA" hats, which are also being sold on Amazon. “You ‘Made America Great Already’ simply by firing and evicting Trump from our White House,” the tweet read. “Get your BIDEN ‘BLUE’ MAGA HAT now.” 

Some of the tweets on the account tagged President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, while others tagged the conservative super PAC, The Lincoln Project and used the hashtag “#45TransitionToPrison.” (There is currently no sign that a Biden administration won’t at least consider pardoning Trump.) But the hats are not officially affiliated with the Biden team and have apparently been sold on Amazon since at least 2019 to show support for veterans, according to Newsweek. Still, following Biden and Kamala Harris's win, the brand seems to be using the incoming administration to sell more of their merch.

Luckily, just as quickly as these hats started making the rounds on social media, leftists responded with criticism about “how cultish neoliberal Democrats have become,” while liberals were also swift to reject them. “We don’t need another cult. America just survived one,” actress Yvette Nicole Brown wrote on Twitter. Most people pointed out how embarrassing the hats are, and as one person stated: “NO ONE wants anything to do with this stupid grift.” 

As of Friday morning, the Biden-Harris administration had not commented on the new blue MAGA hats, and fortunately for all of us, they are also not selling the hats in their own merch store. In this year 2020, which has felt like a dark and twisted Groundhog Day, perhaps the last thing we need is a new movement of people wearing blue MAGA hats to leave us all feeling eternally stuck in the simulation.