Did Elon Musk really wear a MAGA hat with a Nazi font to Trump’s MSG rally?
Yesterday, Elon Musk showed up at the Madison Square Garden rally of former President Donald Trump wearing a curious hat. It was black and emblazoned with the words “Make America Great Again,” rendered in blackletter, a jagged letter style often found in heavy metal band logos.
“I’m a black MAGA,” Musk told the crowd.
But people had other ideas of what he was trying to evoke with his appearance. In no time, the internet exploded with ideas about the hat and its writing. Some at X argue that Musk’s hat depicts Fraktur, a gothic font once used by the Nazis in Germany.
But the truth is more complicated than that. According to type and calligraphy experts, the blackletter on Musk’s hat wasn’t Fraktur, or any other Nazi-related font—but it didn’t have to have the same effect.
What was that typeface?
Cheryl Jacobsen, an assistant professor of writing at the University of Iowa, explains that blackletter was developed in Germany as a traditional method linked to the Bible. Flavors of blackletter were used throughout ancient Europe and have been used since then by many other cultures and in many other contexts.
Blackletter has a long history of use in Germany, although it was eventually replaced by Roman letterforms. During the rise of Adolf Hitler in pre-WW II Germany, the Nazi party also embraced blackletter—especially the Fraktur and Textura letterforms—as a nod to its fanatical nationalism. It appeared in propaganda, in the press, and in Hitler’s coverage Me Kampf.
But “the relationship between the Nazis and black letters is a paradox,” says Florian Hardwig, managing editor of the Fonts In Use archive. “In January 1941, as the war raged on, they did a 180-degree turn and banned all broken documents—known as blackletter—from official communications.” Hitler said blackletter was invented by a Jew, although the truth was that the letterforms were too difficult for most people to read.
Nevertheless, blackletter continues as a visible symbol of Nazi ideology thanks to film and TV, and its use by Neo-Nazi groups in Germany and elsewhere. Jacobsen cites the book Blackletter: Genre and National Identitysaying: “Fraktur is now universally regarded as a Nazi text, even after being banned by the Nazis themselves.”
Fully agree that Elon is trash and racist, but this hat is not a Fraktur font. It’s just a Hot Topic goth font pic.twitter.com/24AY3GvsqT
– tuffy poster (@LeonardTPants) October 28, 2024
Hardwig says the font on Musk’s hat was not Fraktur. “I would describe the style used on Musk’s cap as a modern old English,” Hardwig said. “It’s not in the style often associated with Nazism.”
He adds that “members of the general public associate all kinds of black letters with Nazi Germany, but strictly speaking, the font on the hat is not a Nazi font per se.”
Online sleuths believe the hat uses Anemouth, which was built in 2021. [blackletter],” said Jacobsen.
Why is Musk wearing a hat?
Of course, for the 99.9% of people on this planet who are not typeface experts, the differences in blackletter font families are indistinguishable. For the many Johns, Joes, and Elons out there, the writing styles look so similar that, in our brains, they are interchangeable. That’s why Musk’s choice to wear one on his hat feels full of meaning.
Hardwig says that black character types are often associated with toughness or even aggression, regardless of where they come from. “Choosing such an app style outside of specific categories such as newspaper headlines or beer logos is often done with the intention of offending,” he says.
Musk is a well-known inventor—to put it kindly. To wear this Hats off to this rally, especially after wearing other, less loaded MAGA helmets during the appearance of the previous campaign route, is not an accident.
Ahead of the event, Trump’s increasingly inflammatory language led many media outlets to draw parallels between the MSG rally and a rally held at the same venue in 1939, where the pro-Hitler German American Bund preached its Nazi ideals as pro-American speeches. . Twenty thousand people attended that rally—with another 100,000 waiting outside—where people spoke out against a full-body mural of George Washington emblazoned with swastikas.
Could it be that Musk was unaware of this connection? Maybe. Was he conscious and simply wearing the hat as the proverbial middle finger to his opponents? It is possible. The truth is, it doesn’t matter whether the hat writing is set to the official Nazi typeface or a variation of it. The bottom line is this the message. Even if Musk was just depressed and felt like dressing like a MAGA goth on this particular day, he forgot the main rule of design: Things don’t exist without context.
