Washington: Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" hats tout they are "Made in USA." Not necessarily always the case, a review found.
The iconic, baseball-style hats are indeed stitched together at a small factory in the Los Angeles area. But at least one of the hats in a small sample tested and an outside expert did not contain the specific type of American-made fabric the hats' manufacturer insists his factory always uses to make each one.
The true origin of the fabric in that hat remains a mystery — whether US- or foreign-made and by whom — and a striking example of how difficult and murky it can be to verify something is actually "Made in USA." The Republican presidential candidate has made it a cornerstone of his campaign that US companies and individuals should aim for that standard to bring back American jobs, even if it means paying more.
Informed of the findings, Trump said any misrepresentation would be unacceptable. "I pay a good price for that hat. If it's not made in the USA, we'll bring a lawsuit."
The review included a microscopic analysis of five hats bought from Trump's campaign website, which showed the fabric in one was of a different type than that made by the supplier the manufacturer provides all his hat fabric.
In addition to the fabric analysis, two of the manufacturer's employees, including a top sales agent, said the hats' fabric, bills and stiffeners were imported.
The factory's owner, Brian Kennedy of Cali-Fame of Los Angeles Inc., said the two employees were wrong, but he refused to explain the fabric discrepancy. Federal law requires that items labeled "Made in USA" be made from materials "all or virtually all" from the US.
"I'm not using imported materials," Kennedy said. "We're playing by the rules."
On a broad level, the tale of Trump's hats shows the challenge of revitalizing US manufacturing, which has been ravaged by cheap competition from overseas. Trump has accused Asian countries of unfairly manipulating their currencies to boost exports.
Labor costs in Asia are so low that hats or other clothing can cost less than half the price of products made in the US. Asian fabric prices are also lower, though less dramatically. While Trump has tried to get Made in USA hats for his campaign, knockoffs of those hats, clearly made in China, do a brisk business for other vendors. And Trump's private companies and the clothing line run by his daughter, Ivanka, routinely sell clothes and other products made in China and other Asian countries.
Trump has warned Ford Motor Company that he would place a 35 per cent tax on cars sent to the US from a planned plant in Mexico, and he has pledged to "get Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country."
"All it takes is a commitment to winning and making 'Made in America' a badge of honor like it used to be," Trump wrote last year.
But the Trump campaign's experience shows how difficult it can be to be utterly certain of a product's provenance. Trump said that his staff had visited Cali-Fame's factory and reviewed paperwork guaranteeing the hats qualified for Made in the USA labeling. "It was very important to us that these hats be made in the USA," he said.
The fabric tells a complicated tale.
Kennedy, the factory owner, with a copy of a certificate dated March 24, this year. It shows the purchase of 1,488 yards of US-origin, red polyester-cotton blended fabric, called Saxtwill, from Carr Textile Corp. of Fenton, Missouri. Kennedy later provided copies of three other certificates from Carr Textile, dated September 2015, for components of black and white hats of US origin.
Kennedy declined to comment further after the AP told him that a microscopic analysis of the fabric in a red cap the AP purchased directly from Trump's campaign website did not match the red Saxtwill material that the AP obtained directly from Carr Textile. He said providing any further detail would reveal proprietary information.
To do the microscopic analysis, samples directly from Carr of the same red polyester-cotton blended fabric that Kennedy said was in the hats: one type imported and one US-made. Deborah Young, a professor of textiles and clothing at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles, was asked to compare two Trump hats that the AP had purchased from the campaign website with the fabric samples. The AP did not identify the fabric samples to prevent bias.
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