Trump stealing Winston’s slogan

The Herald reports:

Donald Trump greeted Twitter on Flag Day with two words in all caps: “AMERICA FIRST!”

He has made this slogan a theme for his campaign, and he has begun using it to contrast himself with President Obama, whose criticism of Trump’s rhetoric on Tuesday was answered with a Trump statement promising: “When I am president, it will always be America first.”

He wasn’t quite promising “America über alles,” but it comes close. “America First” was the motto of Nazi-friendly Americans in the 1930s, and Trump has more than just a catchphrase in common with them.

During the early 1930s, as the Nazis consolidated control over Germany, the US media baron William Randolph Hearst began touting the slogan “America First” against President Franklin Roosevelt, whom he saw as dangerously likely to “allow the international bankers and the other big influences that have gambled with your prosperity to gamble with your politics”. Hearst regarded Roosevelt’s New Deal as “un-American to the core” and “more communistic than the communists” – unlike Nazism, which he believed had won a great victory for “liberty-loving people” everywhere in defeating communism.

With the beginning of World War II in Europe and the Germans’ swift conquest of the continent, Roosevelt began to commit his administration more firmly to the aid of the those fighting Nazism. He incurred the ire of various anti-intervention constituencies, ranging from committed religious or principled pacifists to American communists, who supported the Nazi-Soviet pact and therefore the notion that the United States should stay out of the European war.

But the most prominent of his opponents were the founders of the America First Committee, formed in September 1940. The committee opposed fighting Nazism and proposed a well-armed America confined largely to the Western Hemisphere. It soon afterwards adopted the noted aviator and enthusiast of fascism, Charles Lindbergh, as their favoured speaker. Lindbergh accepted a medal from Hermann Goering “in the name of the Fuhrer” during a visit to Germany in 1938, and “proudly wore the decoration”, the New York Times reported. He thought democracy was finished in Europe, that the western powers could not effectively resist the Nazi war machine and that the United States had better make terms with Adolf Hitler.

I think Trump stole the slogan off Winston, not Lindbergh!