President Donald J. Trump should use Saturday’s rally in Tulsa, his first since March 2, to unveil a new campaign slogan:
Make America Great Again, Again.
I thought this some months ago, and soon heard St. Louis radio host Annie Frey second that emotion on KFTK-FM. Donald Trump, Jr. also has echoed this phrase.
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Rather than merely mention them in passing, these words should be emblazoned on banners and hats and expressed by the president, his surrogates, and supporters.
The existing slogan, Keep America Great, is irrelevant, if not flippant and callous, given this nation’s current condition. Plenty remains great about America. But everybody knows she’s wounded in many ways.
President Trump addresses a rally in Montoursville, PA – May 27, 2019.
Keep America Great was a thoroughly dreadful slogan, even when things sparkled, as late as early March. Rather than an optimistic call to build a more perfect union, KAG was a self-congratulatory celebration of stasis. Message: “This is as great as America ever will be. So, let’s stay right here and tread water together.”
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Make America Even Greater, which the campaign should have adopted, would have expressed these aspirations: “President Trump kept his promise to Make America Great Again. But there is much to do through 2024. So, let’s re-elect him and get even busier.”
While Make America Even Greater is inspiring, Keep America Great challenges citizens to sit gently on our laurels for four more years. The inherently defective KAG is now Marie Antoinette-level detached from today’s painful realities.
America has been tempest-tossed by COVID-19, three-months of national house arrest, and an economic implosion.
Just as these storms abated, fresh tornadoes roared in: George Floyd’s atrocious death beneath former Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee, mass protests, riots, looting, arson, and a national nervous breakdown over race.
This has involved attacks on churches, Confederate statues, monuments to Lincoln and other abolitionists, and the assassination of Aunt Jemima — which surely will send black test scores and graduation rates skyward.
Thus, it’s tragic, but hardly shocking, that only 63 percent of adults now feel extremely/very proud to be American — the lowest such response since Gallup first asked in 2001.
So, starting Saturday, Trump-Pence 2020 should fight to reverse all of this, with the battle cry: Make America Great Again, Again!
MAGAA recognizes that 2020’s skull-splitting migraines have left many things worse than when Trump arrived to cure eight years of Obama-Biden’s domestic stagnation, racial tension, and global humiliation (e.g. Benghazi, ISIS, U.S.-financed ayatollahs taking Navy sailors hostage, on their knees; atomic bombs exploding beneath North Korea, Chinese trade cheating, and much more).
Stocks, employment, retail sales, and home-building permits are escaping the dungeons in which they quarantined.
But ample work remains.
How will Trump and Republicans make American great again, again? Through their policies that thrived until the Chinese-Communist virus invaded on January 22.
Before the COVID catastrophe, Americans savored the best economy in 50 years, thanks to personal and business tax relief, robust deregulation, an energy renaissance, modernized trade deals, constitutionalist jurisprudence, and a pro-enterprise tone in Washington.
Today, as with low-interest rates and cheaper energy, the existing Trump/GOP reforms will help.
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Better yet, bolster them: The temporary Republican tax reductions, such as full, immediate expensing of commercial-equipment purchases, should become permanent.
Why not a retroactive payroll-tax holiday for 2020? Making business meals tax-deductible again will fill empty restaurants.
Lower taxes yield faster growth. Keep cutting.
Conversely, Bidenism will re-crater the economy. Biden’s mumbled demands for higher taxes, brighter-red tape, weaker borders, and stricter socialized medicine will stuff a My Pillow over the face of a recovering Uncle Sam.
MAGAA also must unify the country around improved, more effective, increasingly respectful law enforcement: Fight serious crime. Don’t send SWAT teams and frogmen to stage flamboyant white-collar arrests, a la Roger Stone.
No more reckless no-knock warrants, as when three Louisville policemen used a battering ram to enter the apartment of EMT Breonna Taylor, 26. Her boyfriend mistook cops for criminals and opened fire. The officers shot back, killing Taylor. Maddeningly, the drug dealers whom police sought lived 10 miles away. Oops.)
Repealing stupid laws that, for instance, prohibit single-cigarette sales or orderly, outdoor alcohol consumption (quintessential to New Orleans; new to New York) also will reduce police-civilian interactions that could go haywire.
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Trump’s school-choice reforms, permanent funding of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, creation of 8,760 Opportunity Zones to energize low-income communities, and stronger incentives for minority entrepreneurship all will address the nation’s hunger for black advancement and brighter days in America’s most underserved neighborhoods.
In short, re-electing President Donald J. Trump will Make America Great Again, Again.