by John Walters

Let’s take a moment to remember how stupidly we behaved when we were in high school, how much more exponentially stupid we might have behaved when we were with a group of our friends, and how infinitely stupid we could be if we thought our behavior was eliciting laughter from our friends.

Yank the red baseball caps off those high school students from Covington Catholic High School on Friday, and to me this is simply immaturity at its worst. There’s a crowd of high school students on a field trip, and they come across Native Americans in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Now, because 1) they’re suburban white high school boys and 2) they spot something that is different and capable of ridicule, 3) the following spectacle occurs.

Dig: I’m not excusing it, but viewed through that prism it’s just high school boys showing off for one another at the expense of a person whom they’re too immature to see as anything other than a caricature. It’s unfortunate, and certainly there should have been an adult from this group (teacher/chaperone/parent) who should’ve stepped in and told them to cut it out (full disclosure: before any student gets expelled for this, I think the adults on this trip are the ones who merit punishment).

As soon as you add those red baseball caps, however, the entire equation changes. Never mind if the boys wearing those hats fully appreciate what they symbolize. The combination  of their mocking chants, and that central unknown boy’s smirk, with those caps gives the entire tableau a sinister feel.

In my daily congenial chats with strangers I encounter on Twitter, I am often bemused at how offended those who see themselves as proponents of “Make America Great Again” get when I remind them that the headgear is a racist dog whistle. Just this evening someone accused me (and all media) of labeling everyone who wears a MAGA hat as a racist. No, I corrected him; you have it backwards: everyone who is a racist is a proponent of MAGA hats.

The problem with the hats is two-fold: their origin and their implication.

First, their origin. MAGA is not a Republican doctrine. It is a Donald Trump doctrine. So let’s go back and recall the two major things Trump did or said to propel himself into the presidential discussion: 1) For more than three years, he openly questioned the place of birth of the sitting President of the United States. The birther movement was a pernicious way of suggesting that because Barack Obama was black (50% so) and didn’t have an American name (my italics), then maybe he wasn’t a legitimate American citizen. There would prove to be absolutely zero evidence to support Trump’s claim and he would eventually, in the fall of 2015, retract his allegation. But by then he’d already generated a foundation of support.

Second, when Trump announced that he was running for president in June of 2016, he spent an inordinate amount of time smearing Mexicans. “Many are rapists and drug dealers….and some, I assume, are good people.”

The origin of MAGA is based entirely on delegitimizing people of color. And on almost nothing else.

Second, the implication of “Make America Great Again” is simple: America is not currently great. And when did America stop being great? When President Bush’s administration allowed the 9/11 attack? When Dick Cheney and Karl Rove persuaded us that there were WMDs in Iraq when there really weren’t? When, with Bush as president, the stock market suffered its most catastrophic collapse since the Great Depression?

No.

America stopped being great, per Donald Trump and his supporters, when Barack Obama entered the White House. Never mind that it was under Obama that Osama Bin Laden was captured, that it was under Obama that this nation not only dug itself out from financial collapse but that the Dow Jones index doubled.

It’s not that Obama was a saint and Bush was a demon. Both, I believe, were good men. One was a little smarter and was not undone by uncommonly corrupt men in his cabinet, the other was the son of a former president. But both actually did the best job they could, I believe. The difference is that Trump supporters swallowed his line that somehow under Obama (and the Democrats) America was no longer great. Except that there was no metric that would demonstrate such an assertion other than the anecdotal evidence that people of  color or the LGBT community felt more empowered and that the entrenched white community felt somewhat threatened.

Most people don’t have time for a doctoral thesis, so they simply wear a “Make America Great Again” hat. To their fellow supporters, it means that the U.S.A. needs to be far more conservative than it currently is. Just how conservative probably depends on who they think they’re speaking to when asked. To their adversaries, people such as myself, the hat symbolizes hatred for people who are disenfranchised: minorities of ethnicity or sexual orientation. People who would dare to suggest that all Americans deserve equal rights, not just white males or your mom.

If you want to “Make America Great Again,” and if you want to wear that hat to make that statement, first you need to tell me why it wasn’t great before Trump. I’m here. I’m listening. And you need to tell me why you weren’t saying that in 2008 when the stock market was tanking. In 2004 when Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan for no goddamned good reason. In 2001 when a systemic failure by the FBI allowed the 9/11 hijackers to take almost 2,000 (UPDATE: almost 3,000; apologies for the error) American lives in one day with a plan that any motivated group of criminals could’ve executed.

There’s a reason no one wears Hitler mustaches any more. It’s just some hair above your upper lip, but it’s indelibly associated with Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany, a man who lit the match that started the inferno that was World War II, in which 70 million people died. You can wear a Hitler mustache; there’s no law against it. But nobody does. Because of what that hirsute choice implies.

There’s a reason why so many people associate MAGA hats with bigotry and racism, too. It’s because the whole movement was erected on a foundation of such. You may have conservative values, you may hate Hillary (and Obama, too), you may want the government “to stay the hell away from my MedicAid” (even if saying so implicates you as a gigantic moron). All of that is fine. But you can do all of that without wearing a MAGA hat.

The Republican Party did not introduce “Make America Great Again” as a doctrine. Donald Trump did. And like everything associated with Trump, this is the superlative of irony. Because no one has done more to make it worse. The behavior of those teens in front of the Lincoln Memorial (!) on Friday is the latest proof.