Bill Clinton suggested Friday that Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan is a racial dog whistle intended to appeal to white Southerners, an interesting charge considering the former president once campaigned with the exact same slogan.
“One candidate says, ‘I’ll make America great again,'” Clinton said at a campaign stop in Pittsburgh. “Hey, folks. I’m a white southerner. I know exactly what that means.”
When the GOP nominee says he wants to “make America great again,” what he is really saying is, “‘I will give you what you had 50 years ago in the economy and I’ll move you back up on the social totem pole and give you somebody to look down on,'” Clinton said.
“One person is making you mad every day and says, ‘Blame somebody else,'” said the former president, who was born and raised in Arkansas. “And I grew up among the people who seem to like that the best.”
However, Clinton himself once touted the line popularized recently by the Trump campaign. In 1991, for example, Clinton promised voters that, together, they could “make America great again.”
Later, in 2008, the former president said in an ad for Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the White House, “It’s time for another comeback, time to make America great again.”
Nonetheless, the 42nd president railed against the Trump campaign’s slogan on Friday.
The America of 50 years ago may have been great for white people, Clinton told his audience, but there was also a lot of discrimination against minorities.
“Saying, ‘I’ll make it great to where it was 50 years ago’ ignores two things: First of all, it wasn’t so great for a lot of people 50 years ago. If you were African-American, if you were a Latino, if you were a first-generation immigrant, if you belonged to some religions and if you were gay, forget about it. It just wasn’t so great for some people,” Clinton said in Pittsburgh.
“And secondly, saying, ‘I’ll make it … the way it used to be’ is like me saying ‘I’d like to be 20 again.’ I would, actually. But I wouldn’t vote for anybody who promised to make me 20 again,” he said to laughter and applause.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is offering a different message, the former president said.
She says, “It’s time we … move forward together.”
The choice in 2016, then, is the choice between anger and solutions, Clinton said.
“We got one candidate preaching anger and another one offering answers,” he said. “One candidate rubbing salt in the open wounds of resentment and the other taking responsibility to sew up the wounds, stand us up and walk into the future.”
