The anti-MAGA hat is going global now

The recent visit by Vice President JD Vance, his wife, Usha, and national security adviser Michael Waltz to the US military base in Greenland may have been to meet with a gold shoulder knot, but it did produce at least one hot item.

- VANESSA FRIEDMAN

The week before the Vances' arrival, Aamraqg Reimer-Johansen, a consultant at KNI, a trading conglom-erate 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, Reimer-Jo-hansen's cap read "Make Canada Go Away".

"I 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 of two sorts: One, Itha Brown compared it 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 easy recognisabil-ity, even on the small screen of smart-phones - has also made it an effective weapon of the opposition, at least inter-nationally. Parody with a point.

The Greenland hat arrives on the wake of a Canadian hat earlier this year in response to President Donald Trump's threats to make Canada the 51st state. That was when Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, sported a hat that looked like a MAGA hat, only this one bore the words "Canada Is Not For Sale."