Trump Picks a Terrible New Slogan

Mark McKinnon: “It was no surprise, then, when Trump announced that his reelection-campaign theme would be ‘Keep America Great.’ On brand. Direct but sort of meta. He was saying that he’d made America great. And he’d keep it that way.”

“So, count me among the perplexed that Trump, who clearly considers himself a marketing genius, suddenly announced on May 8 that he was changing his theme to ‘Transition to Greatness.'”

“I believe that any bipartisan parsing of the statement would conclude that its basic meaning is: We are not currently great. But we are going to get there at some point. We are on a general trajectory toward greatness. The implication is that we are not currently great, even though Trump promised us we would be. Moreover, even though Trump had promised to keep America great, he was now saying we’re not even going to do that because we aren’t, in fact, great yet. Instead, he is saying: We’re going to transition to all the greatness he’d been promising during the last election. We just have to wait for it.”