Quote of the Day: Donald Trump on Politics & Power

We live in a country of infinite scrolls and instant takes, where politics becomes a meme, work happens on video calls, and AI can manufacture certainty faster than we can form it. In that breathless digital churn, a four-word slogan manages to cut through with almost antique force: “Make America Great Again!”

The line works because it is less a policy than a prompt. “Again” invites the listener to supply the missing footage, an imagined highlight reel of security, prosperity, cohesion, pride. It’s a marketing masterstroke and a psychological one: the promise of restoration is easier to grasp than the messy work of reinvention.

But nostalgia is never neutral. The question hiding inside the slogan is not whether a nation should strive for improvement, of course it should, but whose memory gets to define “great.” For some communities, the longing is economic: factories gone, wages stagnating, small towns thinning out. For others, it’s cultural: a sense that norms changed too quickly, that the pace of modern life unmoored belonging. For critics, the same vagueness can sound like a selective amnesia, smoothing over the injustices that coexisted with any prior era of strength. A phrase that rallies leadership can also sharpen division; its power is real, and so are its consequences.

Donald Trump made the slogan a political brand, carrying it from the world of real estate promotion into presidential power. Whatever one thinks of him, he understands how language turns personal anxiety into collective identity.

January has a way of daring us to define what we mean by improvement, personally, locally, nationally. Applied well, the slogan becomes less a backward glance and more a forward test: can we pursue freedom and opportunity without shrinking the circle of who gets to share in them?