The Gulf Between “Make America Great Again” and “MAGA”

While Donald Trump is not a politician known for his message discipline, he took the world by storm in 2016 with a well-articulated diagnosis of what ailed the nation. “Make America Great Again” managed in four words to assert that America had been great, that it no longer was, and that he would do something about it.

His current campaign, by contrast, has devolved into the litigation of personal vendettas, crass promotion of niche issues like cryptocurrency, and pandering to the donor class on tax cuts and temporary labor.

The rallying cry to “Make America Great Again” has become the personal brand of “MAGA,” and these are not the same thing at all.

ONE THING TO READ THIS WEEK

Your one thing to read this week is “Why Do So Many Workers Love Trump?” Yes, that’s right, we’re starting with a piece in Jacobin, from Center for Working-Class Politics director Jared Abbott.

Abbott goes back to 2016 to remind readers of the original Trump campaign’s intensive focus on economic issues. “If we look at the content of Trump’s appeals to working-class voters,” he writes:

we see that a narrow focus on the darkest aspects of Trump’s rhetoric belies consistent and often quite powerful appeals that tap directly into decades of economic dislocation experienced by millions of American workers. … Trump used pro-worker rhetoric nearly three times as often— and anti–economic elite rhetoric more than twice as often—as he brought up controversial social issues.

When Trump focused on immigration, “his remarks framed immigration in terms of protecting American workers, not in overtly bigoted terms based on the condemnation of an entire class of people.”

Ironically, in a darkly tragic sort of way, Trump the iconoclast was eager to make his economic case at a time when it was novel and, as a result, had little institutional or intellectual foundation. Nearly a decade later, a robust set of arguments, attacks, critiques, examples, and policies is available. His selection of Senator JD Vance, a leader on many of those fronts, as his running mate suggests Trump is at least aware of their existence. But a coterie of Old Right consultants and donors who wanted nothing to do with him in 2016—leaving him to his much better instincts—has taken the reins and seems determined to steer the campaign into a ditch.

It doesn’t fit on a bumpersticker, but time is running out to Make Make America Great Again Great Again.

BONUS LINK: One of the best things written about the 2016 Trump campaign was by Mike Konczal, then a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, now a special assistant to President Joe Biden for economic policy: Trump Is Actually Full of Policy. Policy wonks write whitepapers, Konczal argued, but in politics, the “policy” that voters care about is your description of the problems that they want solved. This was where Trump excelled.