The Rules Of The Game

American presidents also wear baseball hats, but not for the same reason the rest of us do. The baseline presidential wardrobe—dark suit, white shirt, three color options for ties—is basically a flat sartorial plate upon which meaning can be dished with calculated aberration. That aberration often, and with great specificity, takes the form of the baseball cap. As disaster strikes, “baseball caps appear atop politicians' heads like mushrooms after a rain,'' Jerry Ianelli wrote, in 2017, for Miami New Times. Ianelli called the disaster hat “performative folksiness.” A baseball hat on a head of state functions as a semaphore as much as a shade blocker. It can mark territory, show sympathy, build cred, soften character, open hearts, set tone, or shoot a signal flare. Carrying all the nuance of an air raid siren, it is a soft invocation to duck and cover.

Presidents wear other hats: cowboy hats, hardhats, pilot’s helmets, or sometimes golf visors, but only for photoshoots. They don’t wear bowler hats, top hats, stovepipes, newsboys, skullcaps, sombreros, beanies, buckets, bonnets, or barber shops, and definitely not berets. Baseball hats for presidents are inversely correlative to crowns—kings didn’t wear crowns into battle; presidents don’t wear baseball hats into the Oval Office. Emergency, tragedy, catastrophe: out come the creased khakis, the black windbreaker, the baseball hat. And there are still rules—as president, you can’t put the hat on the suit—it needs to be on top of a windbreaker, or at least a loosened tie. Doing otherwise is like mispairing subject and verb. President Obama did it once, in 2015, putting a Chicago Bulls hat on his head while wearing a suit and knotted tie. Everybody, including the president, could feel it was wrong. He pulled the bill so low you couldn’t see his eyes.

Gerald Ford wore one on his way to work for his first day in the White House as vice president, but I can’t find a photo of him as president in a baseball hat; there is one photo of Truman in a leather trench coat and a baseball hat—hands down the toughest ever baseball hat presidential ensemble. I couldn’t find images of their predecessors in a baseball hat. Perhaps this is because it was an era when presidents openly courted one type of person—and they dressed like the voters who actually counted: white, rich men. Despite ongoing efforts to limit voting access for the poor and people of color, basically anyone 18 or older can help push you out of office. Which means presidents want to occasionally dress down to their constituents.

A quick survey of fictional presidents reveals an interesting contradiction: in comedies or thrillers, sometimes our on-screen world leaders wear baseball hats—Morgan Freeman in Angel Has Fallen, or Gene Hackman in Welcome to Mooseport—but not for disasters. They just kinda wear them. That’s because the urgent cue of the hat is in the title itself. You don’t much need a warning signal when the movie is called Armageddon. But in real life (or at least in real politics) tone matters. If you show up to an emergency shelter on a stormy night in a suit and polished shoes, you look out of touch, incompetent.

Even within the good-old and protean baseball hat, there lies a trap. As Richard II says in his eponymous play: “Within the hollow crown… there the antic sits / Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp.” Richard’s admonition is effectively a memento mori to the vainglorious king. In today’s parlance, it is a call to slow your role, to check your privilege. He might as well be describing the twenty-five dollar clownshoe-red skull-frosting to a dog-whistling mythos: the “Make America Great Again” hat, which is more tourist-style Hilton Head keepsake than proper baseball cap. The sitting American president always has and always will revel in antic, state, and pomp.

But it’s pomp by the rules. Trump never wears a MAGA hat with a tie. And never has headgear—not even the Crown of Charlemagne—more epitomized a leader. And when has a world leader worn a hat with a full sentence on it, capturing the blunt redundancy of the man himself? Make America Great Again is a proper imperative English sentence, carrying neither tense nor subject: just the floating, all-bursting command, and empty theatrics.

Political theater is unconscionable in the wake of state violence, police murder, national outrage, and national mourning. The suit and tie is part of the costume that politicians have been stripping themselves of as protests grow. But putting on the baseball hat and windbreaker isn’t dropping the curtain—it’s the actor stepping forward to make an aside to an audience. “Let’s talk of graves, worms, and epitaphs,” the hat announces. Let’s talk of cowards, systemic state violence, and police brutality. Let’s talk about the protests in the streets and let’s talk about why Black lives matter, because those commanding the stage are not.

Trump’s 2020 campaign hat is Keep America Great, another imperative that presumes a present impossible in any regard to describe as great, or good, or decent, especially for those murdered or beaten by police or chased by ICE or lost to Covid-19 or hungry or jobless. A third term, God help us, and there would be no need for a sentence at all. Pure red, pure exclamation, all pomp—that would be the true disaster hat.

Outside of the United States world leaders have a wider vocabulary with which to flaunt their chapeaux. Emmanuel Macron stuck a fez on his head during a visit to Tunis, promising to double investment to the former colony—and signaling he’s a shill for making amends. Justin Trudeau wore a turban on a trip to India to entrench his multiculturalism, but was instead accused of cultural appropriation. Not long after, college photos popped up of Trudeau wearing both a turban and brown-face. Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele wore a white Polo dad hat—backwards—in an interview with Calle-13 rapper Residente, where Bukele dismissed questions about anti-transgender violence. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro fell down and knocked his head just before Christmas last year. When he came out of the hospital he was wearing a Santa hat and smiling like the Grinch. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wore a Mario Bros. hat to announce that the 2020 Olympics was coming to Tokyo, which is now delayed for a year, at least. He may have to wear it again. Fidel Castro, too, liked his hats. He usually wore a flat green army hat, without insignia, but there’s also some good old photos of him in a Barbudos baseball uniform with a B hat on.

A couple months after 9/11, I sat in a large auditorium in Havana, listening to Fidel issue a nearly two-hour monologue to a packed crowd. After Fidel led the crowd in a rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” a friend of mine rushed into the gaggle to touch the hem of Fidel’s fatigues. He squared up with the comandante and asked if he could take a picture of him wearing a Cleveland Browns hat. Fidel obliged, stuck the cap on his head, and smiled.

I guess Fidel was in a good mood. He invited my friend to the after-party, and—there was practically no security—I tagged along. I remember seeing the dignitaries, flunkies, and hangers-on drinking rum and cokes in artificial candlelight, feeling the bass line of a Rumba beat, hovering clouds of cigar smoke. My friend had stuck that Browns hat on his head, trying to infuse it with magic or meaning as a leader might, but the hat was just doing what a hat does. Even when imbued by pageantry or pedestrianism, even when on the head of a Fidel or a Donald or a Gerald or a George, the hat never ceases being a hat. A president can stretch and thin its meaning, but cannot escape its brilliant, humbling utility. The crack of a bat, a ball pitching into the white of the sky; the clouds gathering, the alarm ringing in our ears. We all turn up our heads and squint.

John Washington writes about immigration and border politics, as well as prisons, foreign policy, beer, and hats for various publications. He is a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine and The Intercept. His first book, The Dispossessed —a narrative take on asylum policy and ancient history—was published this month by Verso Books. Find him at @jbwashing.

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