Slogans of White Supremacy

Abstract

Presidential campaign slogans operate as shorthand phrases that succinctly convey a worldview to select audiences. In his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, Donald J. Trump aroused visions of the American Dream and who might have access to it by using three slogans to summon the idea of a deserving yet overlooked white underclass that had been “left behind” by an unfairly rewarded and privileged minority that was morally corrupt. The slogans were “Make America Great Again,” “America First,” and “Keep America Great.” These slogans are directly tied to the racist discourses historically associated with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the United States (1865 to the present) and the Nazi movements of the 1930s and 1940s in Germany. While the Trump campaign initially concealed as a public secret the alignment of these three slogans with a history of white supremacy, by 2020 the slogans had become outright propaganda for white supremacy. In this chapter, we explore the historical connections between these phrases and white-supremacist movements, revealing the racist ideologies behind Trump’s vision of a Great America. We argue that by demonizing minority groups as backward and morally corrupt, Trump was able to displace his own political corruption onto the “Other.”