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One need only analyze Donald Trump’s rhetoric that aims to “make America great again” to see where our loud Presidential candidate aims to take the nation. In many ways, it compares to the efforts made by Charles Lindbergh and the America First Party of the 1930s, which strived to keep the nation from being tangled in foreign involvements.
Like Lindbergh, Trump’s approach is not nearly as telling about the man himself as it is about those who have flocked to his message: people who want to isolate the country while naming all those “others” in the worst kinds of terms possible.
Lindbergh screamed to people across the nation that Hitler was invincible and that it was mostly the faults of the British and the Jews that we were moving toward joining the conflict against Germany.
Had Lindbergh been as successful as Trump with today’s media scrambling to quote, interview and otherwise feature him — and had the Japanese not bombed Pearl Harbor — the United States might have followed the air ace’s advocacy to stay out of World War II altogether.
Just as Trump dismisses anyone and any nation that speaks ill of him and the United States, so too did Lindbergh. As Trump wants to build walls barring illegals, so did Lindbergh and his America Firsters scorn the dangers of virtually any people wanting to gain entry over our borders.
Just as Lindbergh could only vaguely reference the suffering of Jews under Hitler, he was clear to tell the nation that such barbaric realities need not concern Americans, for, after all, our responsibility was only to ourselves, and surely, we could get along with the power-hungry Führer in Germany. Trump, likewise, can find little reason beyond defense for any foreign entanglements.
In the end, the struggles between media, politicians and other partisans to define just what it is about Trump many in the nation adore are missing the point: it is not the man himself, but the same kind of oratory and extreme lingo that were so attractive to middle America when screamed across the radio airwaves and in regional speeches by Charles Lindbergh, the air ace who had achieved heroic standing because of his flight across the ocean.
Until that association is made clear to the same kinds of middle Americans who have been suckered into the insulting but challenging rhetoric of candidate Trump, unthreatened by any imminent assault from abroad, he will continue to roll successfully for the same reasons Lindbergh did, until his voice was suddenly interrupted by the Japanese bombers at Pearl Harbor.
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Joe Honick is President of GMA International.
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