"Keep America Great"? President Donald Trump announced plans to stick with that campaign slogan for 2020, and the odds that the new Purge movie reminded him of it are way too real.
Trump’s proposed 2020 slogan went viral in January 2017 after the internet noticed it was featured in 2016’s The Purge: Election Year, and the president still seems gung-ho on using the horror movie’s phrase. Did the release of the latest in the franchise, The First Purge, which explores the first-ever Purge Night with a mostly Black and Latino cast and frames the event as racist, put it back on the tip of Trump's tongue over the past few months?
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Speaking at a campaign rally in Indiana on 1oth May, Trump reminded the audience of his intentions to keep the slogan. “Our new slogan for 2020, you know what it is? Keep America Great,” he said. “Because we're doing so well that in another two years when we start to heavy campaign, Make America Great Again wouldn't work out too well, right?”
His presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., had submitted a filing to the Patent and Trademark office on January 18, 2017, for protection to use the phrase (with and without the exclamation point) on everything from campaign merchandise to blogs.
Purge producer Brad Fuller wasn’t surprised the president decided to use the phrase. “It felt kind of natural after we made the movie and then he used that,” Fuller recently told HuffPost.
At the Indiana rally, Trump also gave a little background on the slogan. “[Politicians] pay millions of dollars for ideas like that,” he said of the phrase. “How much did I pay for that? Zippo.”
Since the filing, it seems the president has been busy thinking up ways to use the phrase in his reelection campaign. In a speech at a Foxconn factory groundbreaking ceremony in Wisconsin on 28th June, Trump offered an idea of what kind of headgear we could be seeing the Purge slogan on: “We’ll get you nice hats,” he said. “Maybe we’ll make them green this time, instead of red. Green, representing cash.”