America First was one of Donald Trump’s favorite slogans. This should be no surprise since this slogan encapsulates selfishness, ignorance, and prejudice, three of Trump’s favorite sentiments. But of course, Trump never really did put America first.
The first America First was a 1940 committee established to keep the U.S. out of World War II. It was criticized at the time for being too sympathetic to Hitler’s Germany and not sympathetic enough to Germany’s Jews.
Here’s a Dr. Seuss political cartoon from that era.
The Trump idea of America First is different from that 1940 committee, though it is no less self-centered and bigoted. He obviously never did put America or anything else besides his own narcissistic ego first. His corrupt ways were designed to fill his personal coffers not America’s. And as for genuine patriots, like those who fell fighting the Nazis in World War II, Trump reportedly dismissed them as suckers and losers. He couldn’t understand, he said, what was in it for them. He couldn’t grasp, in other words, what it meant to be patriotic.
There is a place for genuine patriotism in American politics when it is connected to worthy democratic institutions. But people who cling to the America First slogan never seem to be embracing that kind of patriotism.
Trump in 2016 seemed to think he could profit from a presidential run by parroting catchy slogans like, “America First” and “Make America Great Again.” Then, when everyone was distracted, he schemed to divert a big chunk of America’s wealth into his own bank accounts.
Trump is in trouble now for his prepresidential shady dealings, but the shady dealings he undertook while in office were not a threat to him. He was protected from impeachment during his presidency by hyper-partisan Republicans. The same people who described Trump as “kooky” and “a liar” in 2016, went on to protect him and his malicious kookiness once he was in office.
By 2019, the Republican Party had become so hyper-partisan that it actually approved of Trump using American foreign aid for Ukraine as a bargaining chip in his 2020 campaign. Then, in January 2020, most Republicans gave a thumbs up to Trump when he provoked a violent and lethal mob attack on the Capitol.
Hyper-partisanship can be found in both parties, of course, but it is originally, and mainly, a Republican thing. As Fareed Zakaria’s historical summary on CNN last week reminded us, it was Congressman Newt Gingrich who encouraged his fellow Republicans to always use disparaging nouns, verbs, and adjectives when describing Democrats. He even handed out a handy cheat sheet to GOP members listing words for attacking Democrats. He offered it as “a lexicon of terms that drive a wedge of distinctions between themselves and members of the opposing party”
Here are some of the terms he encouraged his fellow Republicans to use in describing their Democratic colleagues:
abuse of power
betray
bizarre
bureaucracy
cheat
corrupt
criminal rights
decay
deeper
destroy
destructive
disgrace
greed
hypocrisy
incompetent
insecure
lie
obsolete
pathetic
radical
self-serving
selfish
shame
sick
stagnation
steal
threaten
traitors
unionized
waste
Gingrich’s partisan nastiness was successful in that it helped boost the Republicans into control of the House of Representatives for the first time in over 40 years. But it in no way put America first, and its cost was an entrenched mutually hostile and uncooperative attitude between the GOP and the Democrats. We are paying for Gingrich’s temporary partisan victory today by having to endure Trump’s grossly unethical behavior endorsed and supported by practically all elected Republicans.
What we can see from Gingrich’s early onslaught all the way down to Trump’s manipulations today is a gradual collapse in our nation’s governability. We slipped steadily downward because of Gingrich’s movement putting the GOP ahead of the country and continued to decline when Trump put his own interests above all else. It’s going to be difficult to recover the ground we lost, and it may even prove impossible if Republican leaders continue to be fearful of confronting Trump and incapable of leading their party away from the likes of him and Gingrich.
