Jared Kushner writes in his new book that “MAGA” hats – acronyms: “Make America Great Again” brought in $80,000 a day for Trump’s 2016 campaign. Trump asked to order a thousand hats, and they were snapped up like buns on Passover night
Former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, writes in his upcoming memoir that the famous red “Make America Great Again” hats brought in up to $80,000 a day for the Republican campaign in 2016.
“In the summer of 2015, I was in Trump’s office in Trump Tower when I passed by the desk of Amanda Miller, the head of marketing and communications for the Trump Organization,” Kushner writes in the book “Breaking History”, which will be released on August 23. “I noticed a wide-brimmed old-school style red baseball cap with four words in bold white letters: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”
“Amanda said Trump called her into his office and designed the hat himself and asked her to order a thousand,” said Ivanka Trump’s husband. “She ordered a hundred, thinking he would never know the difference,” the New York Post reported.
“Not long after,” Kushner wrote, “Trump wore the hat on his visit to the southern border, and it became the hottest thing on the Internet. The demand was so incredible that I worked with Amanda to create an online store, where we started selling about $8,000 worth of hats a day “.
The instantly recognizable hat has become both a must-have item for Trump supporters and a summer accessory among those who assumed Trump’s ambitions to reach the White House would fail. Trump critics treated the hat as a joke. A June 2016 article in Esquire magazine mocked Trump for his candidacy, writing that the hats “may go down as the Trump campaign’s only lasting contribution to political history.”
Kushner writes that the hats became so popular that he partnered with Brad Parscale, who ran Trump’s campaign website, to “start spending $10,000 a day on Facebook ads to sell the hats, bypassing Lewandowski’s (then-campaign manager) budget constraints ).
“We increased online hat sales tenfold from $8,000 to $80,000 per day, which funded most of the campaign’s costs,” he continues. Kushner does not specify the cost of producing the hats, but previous analysis showed it could be between $2 and $3, based on the listed rates of some of the companies involved in the production, the hats sold like Passover buns.
It is not clear exactly how much money the Trump campaign raised from the hats. If the $80,000 figure had been around for 365 days—or a slightly shorter period of time than the caps were available—they could have brought in about $29 million in revenue. The Trump campaign in 2016 spent nearly $326 million in total.