Donald J. Trump’s campaign is touting an American flag pin with the former president’s name scrawled in all capital letters in gold block letters as a must-have fashion accessory for its supporters.
The pins became available for purchase starting Thursday for a $50 donation to the Trump campaign, the latest merchandising strategy by the candidate who has promoted numerous products over the decades, most recently a Bible and Trump sneakers.
The pin donation page declared Trump’s political opponents had turned him into a convicted felon and asked his supporters if they could help.
His latest marketing strategy is further testing the norms of flag etiquette and drawing new scrutiny from critics.
The flag furor surrounding Trump, whose birthday falls on Flag Day on June 14, isn’t the only one. Some election deniers have also flown the flag, a historical symbol of suffering, upside down to protest Trump’s 2020 election loss. An upside-down flag was also flown in the home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who said it was the work of his wife.
Altering the flag is prohibited by the U.S. Flag Act, which was written in the 1920s by patriotic and civic groups, including the American Legion, and passed into law by Congress in 1942.
“Fundamentally, there should be nothing written on the flag,” Ted Kaye, executive director of the North American Vexillology Society, a group of flag scholars and enthusiasts, said Saturday. “The flag is not a template for advertising or political messaging.”
But there’s a caveat, according to Kaye: The Flag Code, he said, has no enforcement provisions and doesn’t mention depictions of the American flag.
“Obviously, that’s where people can get around the flag law,” he said.
Some of Trump’s critics, including President Biden’s campaign team, say he is co-opting the national symbol in a completely unintended way.
“Donald Trump is a desperate convicted criminal who is only interested in his own interests and has no respect for our flag, our country or the office he seeks to hold,” Biden campaign spokesman James Singer said in an email. “He is using his campaign to sell out America, line his own pockets, and return to power.”
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Chang fired back in a statement.
“Joe Biden and his campaign hate America and have no respect for its values, so they want to see the flag burned like they did during the campus riots,” Chang said.
When Trump took office in 2016, he made the flag a central part of his branding, and his supporters jumped on board, superimposing his image and name onto the American flag, which became a ubiquitous feature at his rallies, along with banners bearing the slogan “Make America Great Again.”
After speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2020, Trump embraced and kissed an American flag onstage and said, “I love you, baby.” Rows of flags are a staple of his political stagecraft.
Starting with Flag Day, the Biden campaign ran television ads in several battleground states for three days, highlighting images of Trump supporters waving MAGA flags who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
That day, while lawmakers were certifying Biden’s presidential election, another group of Trump supporters tried to replace the American flag with a Trump flag at the Capitol.
Between the riots and Biden’s inauguration, an upside-down flag was flown outside Justice Alito’s home in Alexandria, Virginia. Justice Alito said the flag had been raised by his wife, Martha Ann Alito, during an argument with a neighbor.
Legal experts say the upside-down flag, which has become a symbol of protest for some Trump supporters, creates the illusion of prejudice and calls into question Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol storming.
Kaye, the flag expert, said upside-down flags were first used to indicate a ship was in distress in the 1600s, possibly around the time of the Anglo-Dutch Wars. American ships also adopted them, but the practice fell into disuse with the invention of wireless, Kaye said.
He pointed out that the Flag Code spells out how the American flag should be flown: “The flag shall never be flown downwards except as a signal of emergency when there is extreme danger to life or property.”
Still, the Flag Act makes no mention of using the flag as a “political statement,” said Kaye, who noted that the flag was turned over by opponents of the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ’70s.
Kaye said one of his neighbors in Portland, Oregon, recently asked him if he would be mistaken for a Trump supporter if he had an American flag flying out front on his house.
“I said, ‘As long as you have a Biden sign in your yard, people aren’t going to misunderstand what it means to fly an American flag at the same time,'” he said.
