Donald Trump’s red MAGA hats earned $80,000 per day for his 2016 presidential election campaign, Jared Kushner writes in his upcoming memoir.
The former president’s son-in-law writes that Mr Trump’s aides only ordered 100 of the hats to begin with before they became a hit with his supporters on the campaign trail.
Mr Kushner writes in Breaking History, which is due out next month, that they ended up selling enough hats to cover most of the campaign’s daily expenses.
He states that he first noticed the red hats in an office at Trump Tower in 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,” Mr Kushner writes, according to an excerpt obtained by The New York Post.
“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. She’d ordered a hundred, thinking he’d never know the difference.”
And he added: “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.”
Mr Kushner says that eventually he and Brad Parscale started to spend $10,000 in daily Facebook ads, and saw sales spike.
“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 writes.
Mr Kushner does not give the cost of manufacturing the hats, but the Post estimates it at between $2 and $3 per hat.
The newspaper suggests that if the hats were sold for a full year they could have contributed $29m to the Trump campaign’s 2016 spend of $326m.
