President Donald Trump’s campaign committee trademarked the slogan for his second term two days before he was inaugurated for his first.
“KEEP AMERICA GREAT!” reads the slogan trademarked on January 18, 2017.
Trump had personally trademarked the slogan for his 2016 campaign four years before, six days after Barack Obama was elected to a second term. In both instances, Trump was thinking four years ahead, two seemingly rare instances of foresight in a man widely believed to possess virtually none.
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Maybe there is more to him than many of us like to think.
Maybe he is capable of foresight in many other matters.
Maybe he just seems he does not because he is indifferent to consequences such as give most of us pause.
Not many of us would steal Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” and trademark it as our own in 2012. Even fewer of us would claim in 2015 that we had thought it up just the year before.
“The line of ‘Make America great again,’ the phrase, that was mine, I came up with it about a year ago, and I kept using it, and everybody’s now using it, they are all loving it,” Trump said in March of 2015.
Even those of us who have no compunctions about lying might hesitate to say such an easily documented lie. But among too many in a country that had gone from Honest Abe to Dishonest Don, brazenness seems to be more admired than honesty.
Want to scare yourself?
Consider that Trump is not as blindly impulsive as he often seems.
Consider that he actually knows what he is doing.
After he lied about inventing a slogan in 2015 that he had trademarked in 2012 and had in fact been coined by the Raegan campaign more than three decades before, Trump said, “I don’t know, I guess I should copyright it.”
He seems to have been well aware of the lie and just toying with us when he then added, “Maybe I have copyrighted it.”
And perhaps in that was his greatest foresight; he could lie and it would not matter.
The most paranoid among us will be glad to know that one slogan has already been trademarked.
“PRESIDENT FOR LIFE” was taken in 2012 by some guy in Brooklyn.
