Democrats recycle ‘racist’ Trump vow to ‘take back this country’

“Let us celebrate this 54th anniversary, but let us not mistake what our mission must be,” Clinton said. “I know that if we, if we do our part, we can take back this country and put it back on the path that was begun and forged here in Selma 54 years ago.”

Clinton said this week she won’t run again in 2020, but other Democrats who are running are also making use of the phrase. Before she declared in January that she was running for the White House, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., conveyed her plan to turn the rhetoric into reality at the 2017 California Democrats State Convention.

“Democrats, we know we have a long road and many fights ahead. It may get harder before it gets easier. But I’ll tell you how we take our country back. It starts with you,” the former California attorney general said, according to her prepared remarks.

It’s a far cry from 2015 and 2016, when then-candidate Donald Trump was criticized by Democrats and pundits for ginning up his supporters with the vow. He reiterated it right up until election eve when it featured in his final ad, “Donald Trump’s Argument For America.”

“I’m doing this for the people and for the movement. And we will take back this country for you, and we will make America great again,” he said.

Democrats complained about the phrase, and several journalists said he was being racist for implying he wanted to take the country back to a time before Barack Obama became the nation’s first black president.

“You said it was a tribute to people wanting to take their country back. Because I know you’ve heard the criticism, people out there saying it is a dog whistle, there’s some sort of racist intent behind it. Can you please respond to that?” CNN’s Don Lemon asked Trump in 2015.

On election night, Democrat Van Jones, appearing on the same network, described Trump’s win as a “white-lash against a changing country” and “a black president,” referring to former President Obama.

“When you say you want to take your country back, you’ve got a lot of people who feel that we’re not represented well either,” Jones said. “But we don’t want to feel that someone has been elected by throwing away some of us to appeal more deeply to others.”

The scrutiny continued during the Trump administration’s first year when former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke parroted it amid the 2017 unrest in Charlottesville, Va., triggered by tensions between people demonstrating to save Confederate statues and counter-protesters.

“We are determined to take our country back,” Duke said. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back and that’s what we’ve got to do.”

Just a few years later and with Democrats working furiously to replace Trump in the White House, the phrase is being adopted by the Left, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.

“It is time to organize, time to galvanize, time to take back our democracy,” she said last month when she announced she was contesting the presidency.

[Read more: Amy Klobuchar announces 2020 campaign offering a vision of a renewed sense of community]

Democratic Sens. Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, although not White House contenders, have also kept it in circulation.

The expression’s genesis is unclear, but it was borrowed heavily by the Tea Party in 2009 and by former President Bill Clinton in 1992.

“[I want to thank] the county commissioners from Philadelphia, all the people who helped me to give this campaign to the people of Pennsylvania. And their message is they want their country back,” the 42nd president said after he won the Pennsylvania presidential primary.

Clinton’s top two advisers, James Carville and Paul Begala, then leveraged it into a book, Take It Back: Our Party, Our Country, Our Future, published in 2006 when Republicans controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. Similarly, Jeff Weaver, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign manager, wrote a memoir in 2018 titled, How Bernie Won: Inside the Revolution That’s Taking Back Our Country — and Where We Go from Here.

But Trump has not relinquished his claim on the rhetoric. His re-election team and the Republican National Committee, working together under the banner of his Trump Make America Great Again Committee, have incorporated it into their fundraising messaging.

“We can’t afford a Supreme Court packed with liberal activist judges. We can’t afford any more attacks on our Constitutional Rights. And we can’t afford to be so politically correct that it paralyzes our nation’s safety,” they write on their donor portal. “It’s time to take our country back.”