New York Times: “If particulars of the future of the MAGA hat are in doubt, that it has a future is all but assured. With the president’s refusal to acknowledge losing the election, expressions of support are now bound up with his denial, defiance and insistence that he has been wronged. In 2015, the MAGA slogan was defended as a broad expression of yearning for a nonspecific past; after 2016, the particulars of that yearning became much harder to deny. In 2021, a MAGA hat, true to its slogan, might still refer to a desire for restoration, only not of the vague ‘good old days’ generations in the past, but of the four years immediately behind it. There are hints of the MAGA hat’s future abroad, already, as loosely connected right wing movements around the world have adopted it, or versions of it, understanding, correctly, that its slogan was never merely literal.

“The MAGA hat of the future would be a symbol of a lost cause; a hope, or a threat, that a movement might rise again; and, finally, an expression of an ideology that sees any government but one run by its own as illegitimate but that would be defended, however implausibly, as a mere expression of support for fairness and security in elections. Had there never been a MAGA hat, it would be hard to come up with an item better suited to the needs of the president and his most ardent supporters, tomorrow and in the years after, slogan and all. It’s merchandise turned symbol of state now ready to fulfill its ultimate destiny as a commercial product. A president who never concedes, even if he steps aside, is telling a story that leaves open a comforting option for the millions of people with MAGA hats at home: to keep wearing them.”