How a Chinese MAGA hat maker got caught in Trump's trade war
Love Trump? Buy a hat. Hate him? Still buy a hat. But "Brother Wang" neither loves nor hates.
You’ve probably read plenty of stories about products caught in the crossfire of the China-U.S. trade tensions — toys, bicycles, sneakers, even wedding dresses. I was originally going to introduce you to a case involving an American bridal retailer entangled in tariff trouble with its Chinese factory partner. I even had a title in mind: “How Americans' wedding dresses got tangled in the Great Divorce Between the U.S. and China” -- a nod to Robert Wu’s The Great Divorce newsletter.
But then I came across a story that might be even more compelling — one about the Chinese manufacturer behind the iconic “MAGA” hat. I first heard about it on an episode of the Chinese podcast Sheng Dong Ji Xi (声东击西) on the Xiaoyuzhou platform. The episode, recorded about a month ago, was a bonus drop added on short notice — a sign, perhaps, of how unexpectedly fascinating the story was.
Roughly a month later, a Chinese independent media outlet called Direct Connect (正面连接), which uses the tagline “Facing Complexity,” ran a detailed report on the same subject via its WeChat blog. Both the podcast and the report are, in my view, worth your attention.
Today, I’d like to introduce you to the report by Direct Connect. Its protagonist is known simply as Brother Wang (王大哥), a hat maker based in Ligezhuang Town in Jiaozhou, east China's Shandong Province — a place often referred to as “China’s hat capital.”
Brother Wang isn’t interested in politics — he only cares about making a living. But despite his indifference, he still found himself swept into the global trade war.
Beyond the series of dramas he’s faced over the past year, what struck me most was his attention to detail in designing the MAGA hat. He was probably the first to come up with a mesh-back version for customers in hotter parts of the U.S., and he kept innovating with colors — from gray and black-gold to holiday-themed versions in rose white and red-and-green for Christmas. He even designed a hat for Kamala Harris supporters (though, as he later observed, they didn’t seem too fond of wearing hats).
And when he spotted Elon Musk sporting a new gothic-style black MAGA hat, he skipped the usual prototyping phase and rushed straight into production.
To me, this reflects something essential about many of China’s small business owners: a scrappy spirit marked by sharp instincts, customer-oriented thinking, a willingness to break from convention, and a constant drive to experiment. It's this very mindset that helped turn China into the world’s factory for countless niche products over the past two decades.
Trump, Harris, even Musk — everyone has their own hat. Left, right, center — slogans from all sides end up stitched across caps. But in Mr. Wang’s hat shop in Ligezhuang Town, politics doesn’t matter. Each hat sells for 14.99 U.S. dollars, no matter the message.
The Guy Behind the MAGA Hat
Jiaozhou is a county-level city under Qingdao, and in it there’s a town called Ligezhuang, known as China’s Hat-Making Capital. The town produces 500 million hats a year, shipped to countries across Europe, America, Asia, and Africa. About one-third of the world’s baseball caps come from Jiaozhou.
In 2016, Brother Wang dropped by a friend’s factory and saw piles of red hats printed with “Make America Great Again.” He asked about them and was told that American clients had recently been placing a ton of orders for this design.
“Make America Great Again,” or MAGA for short, was Trump’s campaign slogan.
Wang was 23 that year. A local of Ligezhuang, he had the classic Jiaozhou accent—he said “make” like “mei-ke” and called a product model a “kuar.”
Around a third of the town’s residents work in the hat business. Wang grew up around hats and developed a keen eye for them. He had no idea what the words on the hat meant, but he figured there was money to be made. His friend had leftover stock he couldn’t move, so Wang thought, why not sell a few himself? He started buying up end-of-line goods from his friend—200 hats per box, each costing about eight or nine yuan. He bought two or three boxes at a time and flipped them.
He chose Amazon as his sales channel. The platform didn’t require ads to get started. Just list your product and you’re good to go. Pricing was also pretty freeform. Wang saw that most hats on Amazon were priced with a ".99" ending, and a lot of sellers had chosen 14.99 U.S. dollars. So he followed the trend and priced his hats at 14.99 U.S. dollars each.
Shipping was straightforward. Once an order came in, he clicked “Ship” in the Amazon backend. The system would assign a warehouse somewhere in the U.S., with codes like MIA1 for Miami or VUGA for Pittsburgh. Wang didn’t know American geography and had no idea what the codes meant. All he did was send off the boxes and wait for the hats to get distributed to every corner of the US.
Once the shipment date was set, a UPS courier would show up in Ligezhuang to pick up the packages. Each box held 200 hats, and air freight cost around 1,600 yuan (about 220 U.S. dollars). UPS, the world’s largest logistics company, would carry Wang’s hats across the Pacific. About ten days later, they’d arrive at warehouses on the far side of the ocean.
Once the hats were shipped, Wang let them go.
From 2016 to 2020, Trump won one election and lost the next, but Wang’s hats didn’t change. He was selling maybe two or three a day, tops. He didn’t care. He already owned a handicrafts factory, and the hats were just a side gig. Honestly, he didn’t even know who Trump was.
Trump’s official store proudly claimed: “All our products are 100% made in the USA.” Meanwhile, Jiaozhou-made hats quietly slipped into the mix, blending in among the 55 U.S. dollars caps worn by Trump supporters across America.
MAGA Hats—Made in China.
Trump Gets Shot, Wang Hits the Jackpot
In December 2020, after Trump lost re-election, the MAGA hat was expected to fade out: donated, boxed up, forgotten. But Trump refused to concede. Months later, his hardcore supporters stormed the Capitol wearing those same red hats. When the chaos cleared, MAGA hats were scattered all over the steps.
Fast forward to mid-2024. Wang checked his Amazon dashboard and saw a spike. Sales had jumped from a few orders a day to 30. Curious, he checked the news. The US election was heating up again. Trump was back, and his loyal fans were once again gearing up with MAGA caps. Business was booming. Wang’s leftover stock couldn’t keep up. Soon, even his friend’s factory was out of hats.
Time to shift gears.
Wang had been running a factory for over a decade: up at 7, making samples, managing the books, packing orders, delivering shipments, grinding until 11 p.m. every day, often unable to sleep. This time, he didn’t want to deal with production himself. He’d outsource it.
He opened Amazon and saw the screen filled with identical red caps. The design, according to some, came straight from Trump: Republican red, plain Times New Roman font.
Wang then searched Trump caps using Chinese characters on Amazon, and picked a random photo, sent it to a local factory he knew, and started making his own MAGA hats.
In the trade, these are called “six-panel hats”, with six big fabric pieces stitched together. Not exactly beginner-level. You need a layout, fabric cutting, eyelets, stitching, embroidery, shaping, seam sealing, buttons, and final packaging. It passes through four workshops and nearly 20 production steps.
Ligezhuang isn’t just home to big factories. Plenty of families run small workshops from home. Larger manufacturers often outsource specific steps to villagers. But Wang chose a bigger operation that handled everything in-house, producing up to 40,000 hats a month.
His only job was finalizing the layout. The designer mocked up the image on a computer and printed a sample. The first version had the word “MAKE” too small. The designer enlarged the font, printed again. Back and forth a few more times. Two hours later, it was locked in. Production kicked off.
While the election battle raged across the Pacific, Wang was glued to Amazon, watching his sales climb. The more hats he sold, the better his mood. “Who doesn’t get happy when the money rolls in?” With Trump surging in the polls, business was on fire. Wang started scaling up. He went from ordering 200 hats at a time to 600, then 2,000. Every time he shipped a batch to the US, he had to restock. At any given moment, he needed at least 2,000 hats in hand.
On July 14, 2024, MAGA hat sales exploded, with nearly 2,000 sold in just one day. Wang checked the news and saw what was all over the headlines: Trump had been shot during a rally. He immediately ramped up his orders, buying 5,000 hats at a time. With demand outpacing supply, speed became everything. Wang started placing orders at multiple factories—some run by friends, some by relatives, some he just found on the fly.
But no matter how he planned, reality moved faster. He’d place an order, sales would spike again, and he’d rush to add more. Sometimes the hats hadn’t even shipped before he decided it still wasn’t enough and placed another round of chaotic, overlapping orders.
The buyers were unpredictable too. Orders poured in, but so did cancellations. Sometimes the hats hadn’t even made it to the U.S. before the buyer pulled out. At one point, up to a third of all orders were being returned.
Everything was a blur. The numbers didn’t make sense anymore, and there was no time to sort them out. So Wang stopped trying. All he knew was: he was making money. In the days after the shooting, he estimated he’d pulled in 200,000 to 300,000 yuan. At that point, all he hoped for was a Trump win.
Wang Miscalculated
The first MAGA hat made its debut on July 23, 2015. In Texas, Trump wore a white cap with blue letters. It caught everyone’s attention. That was the original version. Soon after, it evolved into the now-iconic red cap with white text.
Later, even more variations popped up thousands of miles away in Ligezhuang, Jiaozhou. When Wang first joined the game, there were only two main styles: the classic all-red hat and a version with a red brim and a tuft of fake golden Trump hair. Wang figured the hair version was too gimmicky to go mainstream. But the plain red hat was already flooded in the market—other sellers had a head start with better rankings and steady sales. There was no way to beat them head-on. So, Wang decided to get creative.
He remembered learning back in school just how big the U.S. was, with all kinds of climates. “It’s gotta be too hot for hats in some places,” he thought. “What if I gave them something with mesh?” So he made a batch of mesh-backed MAGA hats. The first 600 sold out in two days and hit No. 1 on Amazon’s New Releases.
Wang rushed to restock, but the window had already closed. Other sellers jumped on the trend, and by the time his new inventory arrived, mesh hats were everywhere. His product dropped back in rankings, crowded out by copycats. So he pivoted again, this time experimenting with colors: gray, black-and-gold, even holiday-themed versions in rose white and red-and-green for Christmas.
On July 21, 2024, President Biden dropped out of the race. Vice President Kamala Harris announced her run for president.
Wang was scrolling through TikTok when he saw the news: Harris was now Trump’s opponent. He figured, "Yep, there’s a market for this too." He opened Amazon. Sure enough, Harris hats had already hit the shelves.
The Harris hat took a page from pop star Chappell Roan’s merch: camouflage base, bright orange embroidery that read “HARRIS WALZ.” It launched at 40 U.S. dollars, going toe-to-toe with the MAGA hat.
Wang downloaded a picture, brought it to a factory, and had them make the same camo-and-orange combo, plus his signature mesh panel. Once the embroidery was done, he approved the design and rolled it into production.
Wang wasn’t picking sides. He didn’t love Trump, didn’t mind Harris. As far as he was concerned, it was a fair fight. Both hats sold for 14.99 U.S. dollars.
But to his surprise, Harris supporters weren’t much into buying hats. In the end, he sold just three or four. In hat terms, the Vice President flopped fast.
Then came October 27, 2024. Elon Musk showed up at a Trump rally in New York wearing a black MAGA hat. He called it his “Dark Goth MAGA” look.
To Wang, that meant another shot at a hit product. There wasn’t a physical hat to go off, just a blurry screenshot. He brought it to the factory anyway. No one there could read the Gothic-style text, but they gave it a shot on the computer. They ended up turning “Again” into “Agein.” To save time, they skipped the sample and jumped straight into mass production. By the time Wang realized the typo, the first batch had already shipped.
Out of 600 hats, only 40 or 50 sold. Someone left a review on Amazon: “Can’t even spell it right.”
Wang Doesn’t Care About Trump Anymore
At the start of this year, sales were already dipping. Wang said Amazon didn’t need advertising, but the platform would only give one product from each store a traffic boost. That meant all his product variations only had one or two with decent exposure—if the red hat got clicks, the black one sat untouched. In the end, even with all the colors combined, he was only selling 40 to 50 hats a month.
Then one day in early March, Wang logged into Amazon and saw all his product links had gone dead—“taken down, just like that.” He clicked on account status and saw the notice: Intellectual Property Infringement. Turns out, Trump had trademarked the slogan, and Wang’s hats were now illegal to sell.
What he didn’t know was that “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” wasn’t even Trump’s original line, it was first used by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.
But Trump, the businessman-president, has trademarked just about everything associated with his name. EMPIRE BY TRUMP and SUCCESS BY TRUMP are colognes. THE SPA AT TRUMP is a chain of wellness centers. Even the UNITED STATES POKER CHAMPIONSHIP is trademarked under his name.
These days, Trump holds around 600 trademarks across 87 countries, including so-called “foreign adversaries” like Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela. In China, he successfully registered “Donald Trump,” “唐纳德·川普,” and “川普.” He even sued a Chinese man who had squatted on the “TRUMP” trademark, but lost four times.
When his listings got pulled, Wang still had 6,000 hats sitting in an Amazon warehouse in the U.S.. He couldn’t sell them, couldn’t dump them. In the end, he paid 6,000 U.S. dollars to have them destroyed on the spot. It wasn’t the hats he mourned, it was the money.
He’s done with hats. But around town, everyone’s still talking about them. A friend told him there’s a new hot seller: hats embroidered with “Trump 2028.” On Amazon, he even spotted “Obama 2028” ones.
More than 10,000 kilometers away, in America, hats have become a political battlefield. In the ten years since Trump’s first run, MAGA hats have turned into a kind of political statement. Everyone, from far-left to far-right, has learned to slap a slogan on a cap and wear it loud and proud.
For every “Trump is right about everything” hat, there’s a “Trump is an idiot” one. When Trump said Canada should be a U.S. state, Ontario’s Premier hit back with a cap reading “Canada Is Not For Sale.” Even his rival, former President Joe Biden, was spotted briefly wearing a “TRUMP 2024” cap at a 9/11 memorial in Pennsylvania last year, saying it was a gesture of unity.
The hat craze has even made it into high schools. In California, a student named Maddie Muelle was banned from wearing a MAGA cap to school, and ended up suing the school district. To her, it was “just patriotism.”
Love Trump? Buy a hat. Hate him? Still buy a hat.
But Brother Wang neither loves nor hates. He doesn’t know what “2028” even means, or why Obama is trending again. This time, he’s sitting it out. After discussing it with his partner, he decided not to chase the trend. He’s done with high-risk, short-term bets.
Back when he was selling hats, he had a group chat to coordinate with staff and check numbers. After the takedown, he disbanded it. The spreadsheets, the design files—they all vanished with a click.
No more hats. But Wang still has his craft goods factory. A while back, a friend in the same business passed on a small U.S. order he didn’t want. That became Wang’s new gig: necklaces, earrings, and bracelets.
The customer sends over the designs: 30-plus styles, 100+ pieces each. To Wang, they’re flashy and over-the-top. Thick gold chains. He figures they’re for Black customers. The orders aren’t stable, but they bring in decent income at around 100,000 yuan a month.
Hats may be gone from Wang’s life, but Trump found a way to affect him again.
In February 2025, Trump started gradually raising tariffs on Chinese goods. Wang’s American clients emailed him to pause production. The factory went quiet, workers went on base pay, and Wang went home to rest. Other local factories followed suit, Qingdao’s cap industry took a hit.
Wang thought about breaking into the European market, but that would mean advertising, fighting for clients. And he’s never done ads. His crafts business has steady customers, and he picked Amazon for the hats because it didn’t need any promotion. Trying a new platform sounded exhausting. He didn’t know where to begin, so he gave up.
He decided to take a break. After running a factory for over a decade, with time off only during Lunar New Year, he decided to enjoy the downtime. Since the shutdown, his days have been filled with mahjong, drinks, and fishing.
On May 12, 2025, China and the U.S. issued a joint statement: the massive tariffs were being lifted. Four days later, his U.S. customer sent an email. Wang got to work that same day. He called the workers back, put down his fishing rod, and returned to his factory in Ligezhuang.
He doesn’t check Trump news anymore. He says he feels nothing for the man now. In his words: “That guy’s fickle, never keeps his word. It’s annoying. I even supported him, and he turned around and reported me.”