just how tall would the wall be? With tongue firmly in cheek, Bump tracked Trump’s speeches and estimated that the wall would range between 30 and 65 feet, depending on the sweep of the candidate’s rhetoric. The important thing was that the height of the wall was a signal of Trump’s resolve. So too was his pledge to make the Mexican government pay for it, although current and former officials continually said there was no way that was ever going to happen. But as signs of his resolve, the rhetoric constantly brought Trump’s audiences to their feet.
Trump’s promise to build a wall connected tightly with his call in December 2015 to prevent all Muslims from entering the United States until the country can “figure out what is going on,” especially following terrorist attacks in Paris and in San Bernardino, California. Just a few months before, he had said that “I love Muslims.” He surprised many of those following his campaign in arguing that “hatred” of Americans by many Muslims is “beyond comprehension.” Trump argued, “Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life.” One of Trump’s primary opponents, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), said that Trump’s proposed ban was “offensive and outlandish.” Former governor Jeb Bush (R-Fla.) called Trump “unhinged.” Trump’s ultimate Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), argued that the ban was “reprehensible, prejudiced and divisive.”3 But Trump found that his supporters applauded the idea, and he continued to promote it throughout the campaign.
Following the proposal to ban Muslims was a plan for “extreme vetting.” Trump pledged to keep the country safe by creating a “screening test” for potential immigrants on whether they held American values on issues ranging from religious freedom, gender equality, and gay rights, among other things. A Trump campaign adviser said, “We have no reason to bring someone into our country who is going to harbor that hostility [toward American values]. We want to bring in people who are reformers or who support moderation or who embrace or expand pluralistic ideas.”4
All of these elements—the plan to build a wall, the pledge to make Mexico pay, the promise of a Muslim ban, and extreme vetting—combined as an appeal to voters. It was an appeal grounded in Americans’ worries about terrorism and fears about their own economic security, all fanned by a concern that the country had lost its greatness—and that immigrants were a large part of the problem. In “Make America Great Again,” he found a slogan that at once captured Americans’ fears and promised that he would put things right.
Making America Great Again
If the goal was to make America great again, just when was America great? In an interview with the New York Times, Trump pointed to the beginning of the twentieth century—and then again to the end of World War II, in the late 1940s and early 1950s.5 Many Americans pick other periods. According to a Morning Consult poll conducted for the New York Times, Americans tend to think that the time when the country was “great” was at the end of the 1990s. Trump supporters, in general, tended to agree, though they also were fond of 1955, 1960, 1970, and 1985. (See Figure 1.)6
A man holds a “Make America Great Again” sign as supporters of U.S. president Donald Trump and his policies demonstrate during a “Pittsburgh Not Paris” rally next to the White House in Washington, D.C., on June 3, 2017, in support of his decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord.
SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
Figure 1 Growth in Income, before Taxes, 1979–2013 (dollars are inflation-adjusted)
Source: Congressional Budget Office, The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2013 (June 2016), https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015–2016/reports/51361-HouseholdIncomeFedTaxes_OneCol.pdf
A reporter from The Atlantic decided to dig even deeper into the data and found that when America was “great” depended on when people were born. Americans born in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s thought America was great in the 1950s. For those born in the 1960s and 1970s, it was the 1980s. For those born in the 1980s and 1990s, the 1990s held the biggest sway (Table 1). The 1960s and the 1970s, with the Beatles and disco, were no one’s first choice.
Source: Data from: Andrew McGill, “Just When Was America Great?” The Atlantic (May 4, 2016), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/make-the-sixties-great-again/481167/
“Making America great again,” of course, is about much more than nostalgia. It’s about rediscovering a sense of optimism and security, about opportunity and identity. And that’s the message that Trump sought to deliver in the campaign. Tapping into Americans’ concerns was a large part of his electoral success. Perhaps no bigger concern was the widening income gap: the richer are getting richer, while the income of almost everyone else is barely rising. As Figure 1 shows, the income of the bottom 20 percent of the nation’s wage earners has been flat for the last thirty-five years. The income of the next 60 percent of individuals has gone up 32 percent, after accounting for inflation. For those in the top 20 percent, incomes have gone up dramatically: 187 percent. Economists debate about the cause of this widening gap. Regardless of the technical explanations, however, voters sense the change. Most of them are furious, frustrated, or both. And Trump tapped into those feelings, especially with his stands on immigration.
The Battle over the Travel Ban
A week after being sworn in, Trump issued an executive order preventing the citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States.7 The order was no surprise, since he had made a tough immigration stand a cornerstone of his campaign. But his order created an enormous furor—and big challenges for front-line government employees at airports.
The countries were Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. Trump said that the order was part of the “extreme vetting” he had promised to prevent “radical Islamist terrorists” from entering the country. And he created a two-tier screening process, which allowed Christians and those of other religions priority in entering the country over Muslims. At a ceremony in the Pentagon to sign the order, Trump said bluntly, “We don’t want them here.” He continued, “We want to ensure that we are not admitting into our country the very threats our soldiers are fighting overseas. We only want to admit those into our country who will support our country, and love deeply our people.”8 During the presidential campaign, Trump had repeatedly pledged to combat what he called “radical Islamic terrorism,” and he called out Hillary Clinton for refusing to use the term. The travel ban marked his first effort to make good on his campaign promise. When the president visited Saudi Arabia in May 2017, however, he did not utter the phrase.
The travel ban caused massive chaos at airports. Trump acted quickly to release the policy, but he had not warned members of his administration that the executive
