RentHop founder and CEO Lee Lin really admired what he called the “genius” marketing of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

He liked it so much, in fact, that the company’s newest advertising campaign on the MBTA’s Red and Green lines riffs on the recognizable slogan, fonts, and all-caps lettering of the Republican presidential nominee—with one twist.

“Make Renting Great Again!” read the ads for RentHop, an apartment rental site that attempts to use an algorithm to rank apartments by quality rather than just cost.

Lin said he wasn’t worried about a negative reaction to the ads, and noted they don’t make any kind of positive or negative statement about Trump’s campaign.


“We’re not trying to make any political statement at all,” Lin said in an interview with Boston.com. “The one thing that’s undeniable is just how genius the marketing slogan is. We’re not mocking it at all.”

The MBTA agreed. The T recently established a policy not to allow ads that constitute political campaign speech. MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said the RentHop ad did not violate that criterion.

Even so, some subway riders in Boston and New York have taken issue with the ads and how they make light of Trump’s deeply polarizing campaign.

Subway riders generally skew younger, more urban, more female, and more racially diverse, according to a study from the American Public Transportation Association. Polling has shown that Trump is not a popular figure among those demographics.

Lin said that he did not get permission or approval from the Trump campaign before making the ads, but was hopeful that the litigious businessman wouldn’t mind.

“My guess is he has better things to do than worry about someone who is saying, ‘Make renting great again,'” he said.