Day 1,317: It’s a huge admission of failure every time Trump says he’ll ‘make America great again’

“Make America Great Again.”

In 2016, it was a campaign slogan for Donald Trump, slapped on hats and bumper stickers and gleefully shouted to arenas of supporters.

In 2020, laughably still being used by Trump, it now feels like an self-insult. As in, the past four years under his leadership have been an abject failure that has brought the country further from “great”.

Trump shouted the phrase to a New Hampshire crowd at a rally on Friday.

The phrase is a stark reminder that as much as he planned to, Trump can’t run on his desired “Keep America Great” tagline. To that point, the Trump team couldn’t even secure the keepamericagreat.com domain, which is now owned by Joe Biden’s campaign.

Every time he shouts MAGA, there’s the admission that nothing has really changed since 2016.

To wit, Trump accepted the Republican nomination four years ago. The beginning of his speech then was more or less the same as his speech accepting the Republican nomination yesterday.

There’s always been the million-dollar question: what time in American history does Trump think was “great”? Because the past four years, by Trump’s own tacit admission, is not a time even he thinks has been “great”.

A pandemic with a death toll rapidly approaching 200,000 Americans, a tipping point in the battle for policing reform and violence, an economy overwhelmingly favoring the top 1% as millions more Americans are out of jobs compared to when Trump took office, the reputation of the U.S. taking a hit around the world and a litany of other issues litter Trump’s first 3.5 years.

With few major accomplishments to point to, Trump and his team are asking voters to give him a mulligan that he can do in eight years what he couldn’t do in four.

Confessing that he knows things are pretty brutal in the country right now, Mike Pence ended his RNC speech trying to get people to believe that Trump would “make America great again, again.”

1,317 days in, 145 to go

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