The Trump campaign fixed the mismatched letters in its MAGA hats
Introducing the MAGA hat II. The campaign made some changes to the latest edition of its signature hat, including fixing the Gs. Also in this week’s issue:
The Trump campaign app captures way more data than the Biden campaign app
How New York magazine made its de Blasio street art cover
This is my favorite political ad of the year
Yours,
The Trump campaign fixed the mismatched letters in its MAGA hats
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, speculated 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, told Yello 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.
The Trump campaign app captures way more data than the Biden campaign app
Credit: MS Tech/Wikimedia/Unsplash
MIT Technology Review recently looked at the Trump 2020 app and Team Joe app to see what kinds of data and permissions the campaigns requested. It turns out Trump is asking for a lot more:
Credit: MIT Technology Review/UT Austin
The Trump 2020 app requests access to read, write, or delete data; broadcast data messages to apps; and pair with Bluetooth devices, which allows the app to target and track people geographically. If you walk or drive past a Bluetooth beacon, you can be tracked, and this data can be used to build a profile to advertise to you or people like you. Last year, Mashable reported beacons were even embedded by a company in one Republican presidential primary campaign’s lawn signs.
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Facebook removes Trump ads over Nazi imagery
Facebook took down Trump campaign ads last week that used Nazi imagery. The ads, which asked supporters to oppose “MOBS of far-left groups” and Antifa, featured an upside-down red triangle, a Nazi symbol sewn into the clothes of political prisoners in concentration camps.
Campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh claimed the triangle is an Antifa symbol, though the most widely use symbol of the anti-fascist movement is a logo with two flags. Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told the Washington Post, “Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol.”
The campaign ran a total of 88 versions of this ad from the Facebook pages of Trump, Vice President Pence, and Team Trump. The number 88 is associated with white supremacists.
Similar Trump campaign ads that also referenced Antifa but used different images remain up.
The Biden campaign just made its first general election TV ad buy
Credit: Joe Biden/YouTube
The Biden campaign announced a $15 million ad buy last Thursday, its first television ad buy of the general election. The ads will air in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — all battleground states Trump carried in 2016 — as well as on national cable. The ad buy includes $1 million for Spanish-language ads in Arizona and Florida and “a mid-six-figure” spend for African-American media.
Portraits of confederate leaders removed from Capitol
Credit: C-SPAN
Speaker Pelosi ordered the portraits of four former House speakers who also served as confederate leaders to be removed from the Capitol Speaker’s lobby last Thursday.
“There’s no room in the hallowed halls in this democracy, this temple of democracy, to memorialize people who embody violent bigotry and grotesque racism of the Confederacy,” Pelosi said, according to Politico.
The Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection, which is made up of two statues from every state, still has 11 statues of confederate soldiers or officials, but it’s up to individual states to decide whether to remove their statues.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) re-introduced the Confederate Monument Removal Act earlier this month which would remove the statues within 120 days. The bill was blocked by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who said he would “like to have some time to see if we should have a hearing on this.”
How New York magazine made its de Blasio street art cover
Credit: Marcus Russell Price for New York
For the cover of its latest issue, New York magazine wheat-pasted portraits of Mayor Bill de Blasio around the city and photographed what happened after leaving them up. A photo of vandalized posters on a storefront on Flatbush Ave. was used for the cover story Everybody Hates Bill.
A former BdB adviser said one problem the unpopular mayor faces is he’s not on social media and he isn’t seeing the images of police brutality that the rest of us are.
“He doesn’t see the footage you and I are seeing on Twitter. He doesn’t see the cops pepper-spraying protesters in the face or running over people,” the former adviser said. “He is counting on the PD or some staffer to tell him what is going on, and he doesn’t get that the world is watching this play out on their phones as it is happening.”
It’s probably time to get on Twitter.
This is my favorite political ad of the year
This ad has everything. Shelli Landon is a candidate running in the Republican primary for Oklahoma’s 5th Congressional District.
This new botched art restoration is *chef’s kiss*
It happened again. Someone tried to restore a painting and found the task easier said than done.
An art collector who owned of a copy of The Immaculate Conception of Los Venerables by Bartolomé Esteban, a Spanish baroque artist from the 1600s, paid about $1,350 to a furniture restorer to have the painting restored. There were two attempts made and neither worked. 🥴
Here’s a look at Black Lives Matter murals across the U.S.
Credit: @johnminchillo/Twitter
ICYMI, I’m tracking Black Lives Matter murals across the country. Since I published this story on Sunday, I’ve already added murals from a few new cities. You can see the full list here.