The number 1 reason why I think the majority of Americans wanted Donald Trump to be president in 2020 and again in 2024.
Yesterday the Daily Wire published an article about a man who was assaulted by a stranger in New York for wearing a Trump 2024 hat. The article listed several examples of Trump supporters being attacked by people, apparently just for wearing or holding Trump-related paraphernalia.
I have no trouble believing that these things happen. Trump Derangement Syndrome is a real phenomenon, every major politician in the Democratic party has told their supporters that Trump supporters are evil and that it’s moral to attack them, and their supporters include the likes of violent activist militias such as Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Islamist cells, and more.
The wild thing is that although I can understand that these attacks happen, I’ve never once received a negative response to my MAGA hat.
I’m a Trump supporter who wore my MAGA hat every day for the entirety of 2019, and through 2020, and over the past few weeks in 2024. I live in California, in a major city that saw every kind of riot you can imagine in 2020. It’s technically a Democratic stronghold. It’s the home of Maxine “Go Attack a Trump Supporter” Waters. It’s Los Angeles, if you hadn’t guessed yet, and if we accept the theory that most people are against Trump, believing him to be literally Hitler and his supporters to be jackboot racists, I ought to have had at least one bad encounter by now.
I still get a little nervous going out with my MAGA hat on because I know it’s an inherent statement and there’s a chance I’ll have a bad encounter. It hasn’t happened yet despite hundreds of opportunities.
In fact, the opposite happens. Literally everywhere I go with my MAGA hat I get at least one approving nod, compliment, or other affirming response. I’m not just going to places like Huntington Beach, which is MAGA country. It’s everywhere: Beverly Hills, the Valley, Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, Irvine, Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, Anaheim, Westwood, Century City, Santa Ana, Downtown LA (although I hate it), etc. The result has been the same in Northern California, and even in Chicago. A lot of these places are supposed to be uber-blue, anti-Trump dens of liberal outrage.
The same holds true no matter what kind of store, restaurant, or other venue I go to. You would think that grocery stores like Trader Joe’s or Sprouts would be a bad place for wearing a MAGA hat. Same for hipster-run independent coffee shops. These are the trendy liberal cruchy mama spots. These are the places where the Karens congregate to worship at the altar of soy-based meat alternatives. You would think that there would be at least a “you should be ashamed of yourself,” if not a full-on assault.
However, just this past Friday I went into a Trader Joes to get things for a pizza (you need to make a homemade pizza with their dough if you haven’t — do it tonight), and on my way out a lady carrying a toddler made sure to say to me that she loved my hat and that she hopes we’re going to win. She was actually very open about this in front of at least a dozen other people, which I note later on is pretty rare in terms of these interactions.
It also hasn’t mattered what kind of people we’re talking about either. White, Black, Latino, Asian, Men, Women, yadda yadda. The only trend is a general positive response to MAGA. You might say that liberals are just keeping quiet, but if I’m being blunt, I don’t think they are really capable of that. They’ve been given moral license to misbehave by their political icons and all the ego-boosting rhetoric you could imagine from TV news anchors.
I can only conclude that support for Donald Trump and a better America is much more widespread than people think. Those of us who work in the Conservative movement generally have a good idea of that fact. However, if it’s true that there is massive support for Donald Trump — possibly enough to flip even “Commiefornia” — it also seems to be the case that people are generally still too afraid to make their support public. I don’t see nearly enough people rocking their MAGA hats, compared to the number who see mine and tell me they like it.
One of the most common responses I’ve gotten throughout the years — especially in 2020/21 — have been from people who come up to me and say the following. “I like your hat and I think Trump is right, but I’d never be brave enough to wear a MAGA hat around like that.” Sometimes these are literally whispered like we were being watched by the KGB. I get the sentiment, since I also get nervous sometimes about being confronted. But the honest truth is that we have a war of optics going on in America, and the silent supporters aren’t helping there. Liberals who support a party bent on destroying America get to walk around with the fantasy that most people agree with them, when in fact most people are afraid to showcase their disagreement.
That needs to change, and it starts with everybody being a little bit braver. I always say to those worried about public rebuke that if they and the many others nearby who agree would all make it public and wore their hats boldly, nobody would be getting attacked. Our silent majority looks a lot like just one guy wearing his hat to the left. He can’t change that. You who are afraid to go public have to do it.
We only have one more day left before the fate of America is decided, and I hope to God that it will be a knockout win for Trump. But either way, the lessons of MAGA need to be assimilated by all Americans because there are political fights in the future beyond Trump:
I really hope that if you’re reading this today, and you own a MAGA hat, that you will wear it today through election day, and that win or lose you will still be proud to wear it after that.
P.S. In the same timespan I’ve gone to Japan and England. I got the sense that there was broad support for Trump in both countries, although just like in America the minority of anti-Trump people were the most confident in expressing their views. One notable exception was the cab driver in Kanazawa, Japan, who despite speaking virtually no English asked my wife and I “Trumpu o’ Bidenu?” When we said Trump, she declared “Yosh!” along with removing both hands from the steering while for a full-bodied double fist pump.
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