‘Who would wear that – in public?’ Why there are no MAGA hats in Paris
The final week of the Olympics has begun, and the USA sits atop the medal tally. Sigh. This was always going to happen.
Their boosters – from Kendall Jenner and Tom Cruise, to Serena Williams and Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr (that’s Snoop Dogg to you) – are struttin’ ’round Paris like they own the joint. They’re not alone.
There’s a helluvalotta average Americans at these games. Feverish in their fervour, they let it be known in no uncertain terms: “USA! USA! USA!”
Yet even in silence, they would be heard. It’s the hats shaped like bald eagles. The star-spangled bandanas. Team USA outerwear (and probably underwear). The flag – Old Glory itself – worn as a cape. A man dressed like Uncle Sam, swathed in red, white and blue. As they like to say in the United States, these colours don’t run.
Except one, apparently.
Because for all the bedecked Americans who have come to cheer their superstars, there’s been one sartorial item missing: the red hat. Conspicuous usually by its presence, but now by its absence, the Paris Games are seemingly free of the cotton-twill baseball cap with the four-word slogan: Make America Great Again.
It’s worth asking why.
American supporters showing their colours at the Olympics in Paris.Credit: Eddie Jim
The immediate explanation from Americans on the street – and it’s a valid one – is that the MAGA hat is a statement of allegiance not to America, but to Donald Trump. You don’t pop one on to support sprinters and swimmers.
Donald Trump sports his MAGA headware.Credit: Bloomberg
“They’re not wearing the hats to cheer for America – they’re wearing them politically,” says Kersh Besharat, 16, who came here with his family from West Palm Beach, Florida, to see the Dream Team play. “You’re not really representing your country as a whole.”
That’s true, and yet members of the MAGA movement don’t tend to confine their visual identifier to Republican gatherings and campaign hustings. They wear them to the diner and the drive-in and the Department of Motor Vehicles. Why not here?
“I would just hope that people would know it’s not in the spirit of the Games to bring up politics,” says a man from Berkeley, California, wearing a bald-eagle T-shirt. “And I think that’s a very good thing. Politics is not a positive sentiment, usually.”
The Olympics, of course, strives to be apolitical, yet rarely succeeds. Paris found new fronts in the culture wars before the river boats had even docked from the opening ceremony. The first “controversy”: the conservative right mistaking Dionysus for a sacrilegious drag-queen Jesus.
“What about that even looked like The Last Supper?” says a perplexed Lizzie Dudley, an artist from Charlottesville, Virginia, who wears a stars-and-stripes blouse. “People who are ignorant make up their own truth. I thought it was the best opening I’ve ever seen.”
And the hat that dare not show its bill?
US fans wear the flag in Paris but there’s no MAGA hats in sight.Credit: Eddie Jim
“Who would wear that – in public?” she says, shaking her head. “The Olympics is all about supporting our country, which is rare these days for the US.”
In explaining the absence – at least visually – of Trump acolytes in France, it’s worth considering the fraught intersection between sport and the MAGA movement, says Politico senior staff writer Michael Kruse.
MAGA has beefs with athletes from most sports. They don’t like Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce (Taylor Swift’s boo) because he did vaccination ads during the pandemic. They have problems with the activism of Lebron James, who’s here. Nor would they like Steph Curry, who endorsed Kamala Harris in the City of Light.
And they’ve got a history of conflict with Simone Biles – reignited by the GOAT only last week, when she used a gold medal moment to clap back at Trump for a remark about immigrants taking “black jobs” – posting on socials, “I love my black job”.
“The MAGA movement find themselves at odds at times with the most apple pie-ish pieces of sporting Americana,” says Kruse, who has covered Trump for years. “In order to be with Trump – in some simplistic sense – you need to not be with many, or most, of the best athletes in the United States.”
The Olympics is also proudly global, celebrating the “borderlessness” of the world, epitomised by the new refugee team, which just won its first medal.
“It’s an opportunity for exploring gauzy rhetoric about high ideals. And MAGA’s not here for that,” Kruse says. “They’re blood and soil, America first, but their kind of America.”
The way people view the hat is also shifting. No small part of the progressive left now sees anyone peering out from under its brow as a foot soldier of hate. As actor Alyssa Milano once put it: “The red MAGA hat is the new white hood.”
Kruse notes: “Not everybody wears one to be provocative, or to troll. Not wearing them in Paris might be related to a feeling of being so outnumbered. Maybe they are in Paris, and they’re just choosing to wear the bald eagle or the flag instead.”
Either way, for many Americans abroad, it’s a relief not to see them in their midst. It’s also nice to be at a big event where they can fly their flag (literally), without looking like populists.
Elliott Rosenbaum has been coming to the Olympics with his parents since Atlanta in 1996, and is here to see 45 events across 14 sports. In some ways, it’s a thrill to go head-to-toe in Team USA apparel without being misidentified.
“Patriotism and the American flag has become a divisive topic at home, and maybe in an inappropriate and strange way, the symbols have been used by different sides of the political spectrum,” he says, smoothing out his light silk star-spangled banner scarf. “But here, there’s an opportunity to set aside that divisiveness, and rally around the athletes and what they represent: the American spirit.”
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