For all of his many failings, one thing that Donald Trump has proven to be very good at, in both his business career and political life, is branding. The Trump name, usually displayed in ostentatiously oversized letters, has been attached to all the hotels, resorts, properties, and other ventures in which he is invested. The objective: to project an image of extravagance and luxury, as “Ritz” did in the hospitality industry in the previous century.
His branding efforts as president have met with varying degrees of success. The designation of the mainstream media as “fake news” has had remarkable staying power; “Sleepy Joe Biden” and the other pejorative nicknames for opponents are just childish and silly. And no one has taken “Gulf of America” seriously.
But the political brand that has established the longest-lasting traction is “Make America Great Again,” (MAGA) the slogan that defines the movement Trump spawned. Campaign slogans come and go, but MAGA continues to resonate 10 years after its inception. Given its longevity, it deserves closer scrutiny, especially the last two words.
Start with “again.” The implication is that there was a time in America’s past when the country was unequivocally great. There are indeed times that, at least according to their labeling (branding), suggest prosperity, optimism, and national vitality – the Era of Good Feelings, the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties, the Swinging Sixties. But one can also pick numerous milestones marking periods of misery and tribulation – the Civil War, Jim Crow, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, Vietnam, political assassinations, and so on. Such times are presumably not the “again” that MAGA wishes to be restored.
A logical guess for the possible “again” time that MAGA pines for is the 1950s, a decade undoubtedly bathed in the sunniness and innocence of youth in the memory of a branding master born in 1946. It is a decade that evokes a diorama of homespun, feel-good American wholesomeness, of tidy suburban homes with picket fences and well-kempt lawns, when everyone drove an American-made car. It was a time when the men held steady, good-paying jobs and the women, in periwinkle aprons, stayed home dutifully to tend to the house, make meals for their men, and raise a family. It was a time when shows on television depicted orderly domesticity and chaste tranquility – Ozzie and Harriet, the Mickey Mouse Club, the Lawrence Welk Show. The even-tempered, unflappable President Eisenhower made politics seem kinder and gentler. The social structure was comfortable and orderly, uncomplicated and noncontroversial.
As valid as such nostalgia might be, however, all was not paradisical in 1950s America. The country became embroiled in a war in Korea, the first in a string of conflicts in which the U.S. stumbled in trying to affirm its global hegemony. Racial injustice bubbled repeatedly to the surface, sometimes violently, as in the brutal murder of the black teenager, Emmett Till. American families were building fallout shelters as the Cold War ramped up with the dire threat of a nuclear holocaust. High taxes – MAGA kryptonite – topped out at a marginal rate of 91 percent. (That said, the federal budget in the high-tax 1950s was annually close to balanced and often showed a surplus, compared with today’s national debt and annual deficit ballooning stratospherically in the age of tax cuts.)
The point is that, in any era in U.S. history, the 1950s included, greatness is always tempered by elements of failure, confrontation, turmoil, and suffering. Thus, the MAGA call to reach back to some unspecified time of unbridled greatness is a call to a mythical American Utopia or Atlantis that never existed.
And what constitutes greatness anyway? America’s effort in leading the free world to victory in World War II might be a place to start. Yet war is a miserable business, and tens of thousands of Americans lost their lives or otherwise suffered traumatically. The ending of slavery after the Civil War might be considered a great achievement, but the social and economic disparities of racism endure to this day.
Does a strong military make America great? Does wealth make America great? Does global leadership make America great? Does racial harmony make America great? Does a stable democracy make America great? How about freedom, justice, and liberty? Literature, art, and music? Many more such questions could be asked, only leading to the bottom line: a clear definition of American greatness is impossible to pin down.
But such considerations are really beside the point. MAGA is now a political brand, not a manifesto to be taken literally. After all, when read innocently, it is an anodyne pronouncement of inarguable positivity. What American doesn’t want the country to be great? Both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton used variations on “make American great again” in their presidential campaigns.
Indeed, the pursuit of some imagined, bygone greatness is hardly MAGA’s objective. What MAGA has achieved, as a brand and a rallying cry, is to bring cohesiveness to a far-right political movement. It is a movement spearheaded by the Brander-in-Chief who, ironically, appears to be losing interest in it.
He seems now to be more focused on projecting his personal brand into the future, in the form of structural monstrosities in Washington that will forever be linked to him: an oversized ballroom at the White House, a gaudy triumphal arch, and possibly even a tacky fighting arena to permanently clutter up an otherwise pristine White House lawn. Perhaps the master brander envisions a re-branded nation’s capital, where Washington, D.C. becomes Washington, DT – District of Trump.
Oliver lives in Warren.
