Make America Great Again, Again

Donald Trump, teasing a 2024 presidential run, says that his new slogan would be “Make America Great Again, Again,” because “America is not great now,” but you can’t just say “Make America Great Again,” “because we already did it.” 

So let’s get this straight. If Donald Trump wins an election and uses his four years in office to set the table for Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin to become the unchallenged de facto leaders of the world, for the Marxist Democrats to become the ascendant political faction in the U.S., and for the complete disintegration of the last remnants of American republicanism in favor of entrenching the politics of rival demagogues and civility-destroying tribal hatred, this constitutes making America great again. Trump “already did that.” In his next go-round, then, should life be so cruel as to foist that outcome upon the thirty or forty Americans who still deserve to call themselves that, Trump is promising more of the same anti-American, unprincipled, tyranny-fostering personality cult destructiveness that dragged the nation to its current collapse. 

And the Iowa crowd cheered for this promise, because they hate their country almost as much as their owner does — and despise themselves almost as much as he despises them.

I know the preceding topic is not worth talking about anymore, in the sense that those people and their false god are not worth caring about anymore. Nevertheless, sometimes things and people not worth caring about, objectively speaking, can become extraordinarily influential and dangerous in practical life. So we simply note this situation and its dangers — not to worry about it, but to remind ourselves of what we must rise above, and of how important it is to overcome every last temptation to put any stock in practical political solutions to civilization’s bubbling morass.