Donald Trump Claims Authorship of Legendary Reagan Slogan

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

25 March 15

Latest anti-Cruz broadside is dumbest yet

e should get the wire services and pollsters to create a consensus "Dumbest Americans" list, the way BCS football teams or boxing contenders are rated. Not only would it be fun, but it would be a way for Donald Trump to stay in the news without having to say dumb things all the time.

Trump's latest attempt to sell himself to Republican voters came in the form of a birther attack against Ted Cruz, the recently-announced presidential candidate who humorously launched his campaign in front of a bunch of Liberty University students who didn't want to be there.

Trump not only gave Cruz a hard time for being born in Canada, but also claimed that Cruz ripped him off by using the line, "Make America Great Again."

He said:

"The line of 'Make America great again,' the phrase, that was mine, I came up with it about a year ago, and I kept using it, and everybody's now using it, they are all loving it," Trump said.

"I don’t know I guess I should copyright it, maybe I have copyrighted it."

Donald Trump must never have heard of Google. Every campaign trail reporter has heard that line at least ten million times, in years prior to last year, from a depressingly large number of other politicians.

But let's just start with the obvious: Ronald Reagan made "Make America Great Again" a backbone of his campaign. He and Bush even used it on a button:

Reagan-Bush 1980 campaign. (photo: Rolling Stone)

It was a poster:

Ronald Reagan. (photo: Rolling Stone)

And it was a TV ad.

And that's just the beginning. I seem to remember Rick Perry using it as well, and I'd love it if readers could dig up the full record, because it would be amusing background for Trump's copyright application.

Maybe if he straps on his Flux Capacitor and goes back in time, to the pre-Spy days when he wasn't reduced to doing reality shows or running for president to make a living, Trump can find a time when he could plausibly claim to have invented that line. But in 2015, in the world of Al Gore's Internet? Hilarious.