The Trump campaign fixed the mismatched letters in its MAGA hats
Introducing the MAGA Hat II
This story was first published on June 23, 2020.
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The Trump campaign on Monday began advertising the latest item in its campaign shop: a new “Make America Great Again” hat. The new hats feature President Trump’s 2016 slogan in bigger type and now with matching Gs.
You’ll notice in the original hat on the left, the G in “great” looks different than the G in “again.” The first G is missing a downstroke, also known as a beard or downward-pointing spur, that is used in the second G. It’s been like this since Trump first debuted the hat on this day in 2015 in a campaign trip to Laredo, Texas. Five years later it’s finally fixed.
I reached out to Ace Specialties, the Louisiana company that produces hats for the Trump campaign, to ask about the letterform disparities in the first hat. I did not hear back.
If the mismatch was deliberate, it could have been to set genuine hats apart from counterfeits, speculates Eben Sorkin, senior designer at Darden Studio and founder of Sorkin Type Co. Or maybe it wasn’t on purpose.
“The rest of the lettering doesn’t make it look as if they paid much attention to the finer points of spacing,” Florian Hardwig, Fonts in Use managing editor and Darden Studio portfolio curator, tells me in an email. “For example, the ‘AG’ pair is rather loose, certainly when compared to ‘ER’ in the line above. The baseline alignment doesn’t seem to be very consistent either.”
The new hats feature a “45” on one side, an American flag on the other, and “Trump 2020” on the back. They’re available in red, navy, and white for $30.
