You won’t be surprised that Donald J. Trump doesn’t know history. After all, this is the president who was sure that most Americans did not know that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. And, I guess that’s true, if you are only counting children in the third grade and younger.
Trump, I’m sure, has no idea of the origins of the term “America First.” (Why would he when he doesn’t know anything else?) But I’m pretty sure the term was coined by his shaggy sidekick Steve Bannon, a neo-Nazi provocateur and strategist, and I’m sure Bannon knew exactly what the first America First movement was about.
The America First Committee was a group headed by prominent Americans who wanted the United States to stay neutral in World War II. This wasn’t a Switzerland moment; these leaders — who included auto magnate Henry Ford, aviator Charles Lindbergh, and U.S. Senator Prescott Bush (founder of the Bush political dynasty) — were big fans of Adolph Hitler (personally, in the case for Ford and Lindberg, and fans of Hitler’s money in Bush’s case).
That’s not hyperbole: Both Ford and Bush made millions from selling to Germany and financing slave labor in the Third Reich. (Bush was so cozy with Nazis that his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act.)
Like the MAGA movement, the America First Committee became quite popular, eventually boasting 800,000 members. Lindbergh, who was rabidly anti-Semitic, accused “war agitators” (code for Jews in the same vein as Steve Bannon uses “globalists” as code for Jews) of deceptively drumming up support for the war. This should seem familiar to Fox News viewers who saw Maria Bartiromo celebrate Putin and claim that any talk of war was merely an attempt to distract from inflation and supply issues. Lindbergh would have preferred that the United States side with Hitler, just as today’s MAGA darlings would love to see the United States embrace Putin and replicate his authoritarianism, anti-Semitism, and anti-human rights record here. But they were smart enough to realize that neutrality was the best they could get, so they went for that.
Theodore Geisel (better known as Dr. Seuss) accused Lindbergh of parroting Nazi propaganda in several cartoons. That should also seem familiar to those who have seen Trump and his fellow travelers parroting Putin’s talking points.
None of this is surprising. The 1940s America First Committee envisioned a world where a strongman would cleanse the earth of Jews, Socialists, and so-called “degenerates” (queer folk, Gypsies, “lesser races,” and the disabled). They viewed democracy as weakness.
How does that differ from today’s America First aficionados, who envision an America where only the “right people” can vote or set curriculum standards, where undesirables can be arrested and executed in secret “tribunals,” where laws don’t apply to elites, where masked goons can brutally arrest anyone who appears to belong to one of the “lesser races,” even legal residents and U.S. citizens?
Donald Trump may be too dumb to know who the first America First folks were. But we know our history, and we can trace a direct line from Nazi-sympathizers in the 1940s to the fascists in power in the 21st century.
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