“Make America Great Again” has perhaps become the most emblematic phrase of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign – and that’s saying a lot for a man who seems to speak almost entirely in catchphrases. In March, Trump told The New York Times that he believes America reached peak greatness in the 1900s or even the 1940s and 1950s.
“I would say during the 1940s and the late ’40s and ’50s we started getting, we were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war, we were pretty much doing what we had to do, yeah around that period,” he told the NYT.
Funny how he didn’t mention these were also eras of American history that sucked for minorities, women, and LGBTQ communities.
Yet somehow, even as Trump’s vision of a Great America received wide rebuke from the left and from within the Republican establishment, his Make America Great Again hats became the must-have ironic fashion accessory of last summer. (Never mind the real irony of the hats, which is not that liberals wear them as some kind of inside joke, but the fact that they were reportedly manufactured largely by Mexican immigrants residing in California.)
Luckily, there is now a flip of this hat that Trump detractors can conscionably wear: Make America Mexico Again. Playing off of Trump’s hate-filled message, Jeronimo Saldaña has produced a hat to remind us that before the signing of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, parts of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming belonged to Mexico. The hats sell for $25 through GoFundMe, and all of the proceeds will go to Mijente, which describes itself as “a new political home for Latinx & Chicanx organizing.”
On April 28, Saldaña attempted to get the hat made at Lids, where he was originally rejected. But it all worked out in the end, because he’s now ready to get them out to the masses. Order them here.