From Greenland to Canada, the merching of a protest movement.
The recent visit by Vice President JD Vance, his wife, Usha, and the national security adviser Michael Waltz to the U.S. military base in Greenland may have been met with a cold shoulder, but it did produce at least one hot item.
The week before the Vances’ arrival, Aannguaq Reimer-Johansen, a consultant at KNI, a trading conglomerate in Greenland, posted a photo on his Facebook page of what looked like a bright red MAGA hat. Only, instead of the usual “Make America Great Again” in white letters, Mr. Reimer-Johansen’s cap read “Make America Go Away.”
It touched a nerve — and not just locally. The hats ended up on “The Daily Show” and “The View.” Across social media, the general reaction was “I want one.” Tina Brown compared it to “the French Resistance on ice,” thus connecting the red cap to the “bonnets rouges” of the French Revolution.
It turns out that the very success of the MAGA hat as a symbol of political allegiance — its instant recognizability, even on the small screens of smartphones — has also made it an effective weapon of the opposition, at least internationally. Parody with a point.
The Greenland hats come in the wake of a Canadian hat protest that began earlier this year in response to President Trump’s threats to make Canada the 51st state. That was when Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, wore a trucker hat that looked like a “dark MAGA” hat, only this one bore the words “Canada Is Not For Sale.”