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Former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner writes in his forthcoming memoir that the famous red “Make America Great Again” hats earned the Republican’s 2016 campaign up to $80,000 per day — covering the bulk of expenses after an initial order of just 100.
“Back in the summer [of 2015], I was walking through Trump’s corporate office in Trump Tower when I passed by the desk of Amanda Miller, head of marketing and communications for the Trump Organization,” Kushner writes in “Breaking History,” due out Aug. 23. “I noticed a wide-brimmed, old-school red baseball hat with four words in bold white lettering: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.
“‘Amanda said that Trump had called her to his office and designed the hat himself and asked her to order a thousand,” former first daughter Ivanka Trump’s husband goes on. “She’d ordered a hundred, thinking he’d never know the difference.”
Not long after, Kushner recalls, “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 roughly $8,000 in hats per day.”
The instantly recognizable hat became both a must-have item for Trump supporters and “an ironic summer accessory” among those who assumed the real estate tycoon’s White House ambitions would crash and burn.
Trump critics treated the hat as a joke. A June 2016 article in Esquire magazine, written after Trump had locked up the GOP nomination, predicted the chapeaus “may well go down as the Trump campaign’s only lasting contribution to the political history of the Republic.”
Kushner writes that knockoffs became so common that he partnered with Brad Parscale, who ran the Trump campaign’s website, to “start spending $10,000 a day on Facebook ads to sell the hats, bypassing [then-campaign manager Corey] Lewandowski’s budget restrictions and correctly guessing that by the time he noticed the large expense, we would have positive results to share.
“Soon we increased online hat sales tenfold from $8,000 to $80,000 per day, which funded most of the campaign’s overhead costs,” he goes on.
Kushner doesn’t note the cost to manufacture the hats, but previous analysis indicated it may be between $2 and $3, based on the listed rates of some of the companies involved in production.
It’s unclear exactly how much money the Trump campaign raised from the hats. If the $80,000 figure held for 365 days — or a slightly shorter period of time than the hats were available — they could have brought in about $29 million in revenue. The 2016 Trump campaign spent nearly $326 million in all.
Previously released excerpts of Kushner’s memoir have included the shocking disclosure that he secretly battled thyroid cancer while working in the White House as well as an allegation that former White House chief of staff John Kelly once shoved Ivanka in a fit of rage.
Kushner, whose father, Charles, is a billionaire real estate developer, worked as an unpaid adviser during Trump’s four years in office and wielded substantial influence over domestic policy debates, staffing decisions and even foreign affairs.
Now 41, Kushner was involved in brokering Trump’s US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement and drafting and passing the 2018 First Step Act that included prison and criminal sentencing reforms. He helped lead the White House COVID-19 response in 2020 and led efforts to broker diplomatic relations between Israel and four Arab countries during the final months of Trump’s term.