Mugambi Jouet writes in Mother Jones about the origins of the phrase “Make America Great Again.”

He traces it back to the Republican party’s obsession with the phrase “American exceptionalism” and demonstrates how the use of the term skyrocketed after Obama’s election.

He writes:


Did you ever wonder why Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan took such root among the Republican base? Did it symbolize a return to an age when wages were higher and jobs more secure? Or was it coded racial language designed to signal a rollback to a time when people of color (and women) knew their place? In the soul-searching and recrimination among Democrats after Hillary Clinton’s defeat, both theories have their champions.

But a closer look at conservative rhetoric in recent years reveals that “Make America Great Again” was not Trump’s invention. It evolved from a phrase that became central to the Republican establishment during the Obama years: “American exceptionalism.” People often equate the expression with the notion that God made America “a city upon a hill,” in the words of the Puritan colonist John Winthrop. However, as University of California-Berkeley sociology professor Jerome Karabel noted in a 2011 article, this usage only came into vogue after Barack Obama became president. Previously it was mainly used by academics to mean that America is an exception compared with other Western democracies, for better or worse, as illustrated by its top-notch universities or its bare-bones gun control.

Prior to 2008, “American exceptionalism” appeared in news articles a handful of times a year, but after Obama was elected the references skyrocketed, largely because of a drumbeat from Republicans. Once the tea party wave made John Boehner speaker of the House in 2010, for example, he summarized the growing consensus among Republicans: Obama had turned his back on the Founding Fathers to the point where he “refused to talk about American exceptionalism.” (In fact, in 2009 the president had stated, “I believe in American exceptionalism.”) The phrase’s popularity in GOP talking points—often in attacks on Obama’s “socialist” policies—paralleled the spread of conspiracy theories about his citizenship and supposed jihadi sympathies.

Republicans implied and said that Obama wasn’t a real American. He was probably born in Kenya, and he thought that America was no different, no more special, than any other country.

The irony, not mentioned in this article, is that Trump has already showed–dramatically–that he doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism. When asked by conservative talk show host Bill O’Reilly why he speaks so highly of Putin (“a killer”), Trump responded that we were no better than Russia.

But maybe it is not ironic at all. David Corn wrote in the same publication in June 2016 that Donald Trump said that he rejected the term “American exceptionalism” because it was insulting to other countries.

Corn quoted from Trump’s remarks to a Tea Party group in Houston:

Here is Trump’s complete answer:

“I don’t like the term. I’ll be honest with you. People say, “Oh he’s not patriotic.” Look, if I’m a Russian, or I’m a German, or I’m a person we do business with, why, you know, I don’t think it’s a very nice term. We’re exceptional; you’re not. First of all, Germany is eating our lunch. So they say, “Why are you exceptional. We’re doing a lot better than you.” I never liked the term. And perhaps that’s because I don’t have a very big ego and I don’t need terms like that. Honestly. When you’re doing business—I watch Obama every once in a while saying “American exceptionalism,” it’s [Trump makes a face]. I don’t like the term. Because we’re dealing—First of all, I want to take everything back from the world that we’ve given them. We’ve given them so much. On top of taking it back, I don’t want to say, “We’re exceptional. We’re more exceptional.” Because essentially we’re saying we’re more outstanding than you. “By the way, you’ve been eating our lunch for the last 20 years, but we’re more exceptional than you.” I don’t like the term. I never liked it. When I see these politicians get up [and say], “the American exceptionalism”—we’re dying. We owe 18 trillion in debt. I’d like to make us exceptional. And I’d like to talk later instead of now. Does that make any sense? Because I think you’re insulting the world. And you, know, Jim, if you’re German, or you’re from Japan, or you’re from China, you don’t want to have people saying that. I never liked the expression. And I see a lot of good patriots get up and talk about Amer—you can think it, but I don’t think we should say it. We may have a chance to say it in the not-too-distant future. But even the, I wouldn’t say it because when I take back the jobs, and when I take back all that money and we get all our stuff, I’m not going to rub it in. Let’s not rub it in. Let’s not rub it in. But I never liked that term.”

Corn then wrote:

“When Trump finished those remarks, the crowd was largely silent, and McIngvale moved on to another subject. Yet Trump had just trampled one of the mainstay tenets of GOP ideology—and undercut a line of attack often used by Republicans.”