Donald Trump has made the phrase "Make America Great Again" his campaign slogan. If the slogan stopped after the word 'great', there would be no problem. The word that constantly gives me pause is 'again'. Whenever I watch a Trump campaign rally I try to envision a time in American History when this country was truly great. In my mind, the word great means 100 percent equality under the law. Great also means that you don't need to strut around giving yourself false confidence about how great you really are.
Donald Trump is seeking to get at a very real truth. Some people in this country are not fully feeling the successes that have come with the Obama presidency. The pundits can keep touting the facts about consecutive positive job performance numbers, but unless people are personally feeling the success, they won't believe it. If Donald Trump wants to strike a chord with voters, he should be talking about how people will be able to start feeling the recovery under his presidency.
My fear about this campaign slogan is that Donald Trump is trying to tap into a more disgraceful part of our past. If you follow the polls that several media organizations are putting out there, Donald Trump is winning with large margins of white male voters without a college degree. This begs the question, Who is his message targeted to? The same media organizations are putting out polls saying that only one percent of African-Americans are supporting Donald Trump. How can the memories of when America was great be so starkly different?
Older African-Americans will tell you that they thought America was "approaching greatness" when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act or when the Supreme Court desegregated schools. Younger African-Americans will tell you that they might not have ever seen America as great because their recent memory tells only of police shootings of black people and sad results of the failed War on Drugs. Young African-Americans see their friends as first hand victims of the school to prison pipeline. Cuts to public school funding means that there are no nurses and good college counselors in schools.
That is the failure of Donald Trump's message. While he is trying to reignite nostalgia among some, that same memory is a horror for so many others. You cannot only be president to one subset of people. A good president can bridge the divide between races, genders, socioeconomic statuses. If we truly want to be a great country, we need to make sure that we are accurately remembering the history of this country and actively seeking to move forward in a positive direction.
