The MAGA Con: Again!

By Rob C.

Art by Kevin Siers

TL;DR: “Make America Great Again” is the ultimate marketing scam, designed to make us nostalgic for a past that was either a dystopian nightmare for anyone who wasn’t a white male landowner. From Reagan’s original “Project 2025” to Clinton’s neoliberal betrayal, we’ve been conned into trading our workplace safety, unions, and dignity for “trickle-down” fairytales. If we actually want a “great” country, we don’t need a red hat; we need to stop selling our democracy to the highest bidder and build a New New Deal.

“Make America Great Again.”

It’s a powerful phrase. Simple. Emotional. Nostalgic. And completely meaningless unless you ask the obvious follow-up question Trump never answers:

When, exactly was America great?

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Whenever our “Con-Mander-In-Chief” bellows his signature slogan into a gold-plated microphone, I find myself wondering exactly which year he’s using as his navigational North Star. Given his affinity for absolute authority and his administration’s current crusade against bodily autonomy and civil rights, I suspect he’s pining for 1850—a truly “great” time if you happened to enjoy an economy powered by human bondage and a legal system that treated women as slightly more than cattle. It is the ultimate irony that a man who has never read a history book, or likely any book without his own name on the cover, has convinced millions of people that he is the curator of American greatness.

In reality, if we strip away the orange-tinted nostalgia, the only time America actually approached “greatness” for the masses was between 1933 and the early 1970s. This wasn’t because of “magic of the market” or the benevolence of billionaires, but because a “Democratic Socialist”, named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, looked at the wreckage of a corporate-driven Depression and decided that the state should serve the people instead of the billionaires. The New Deal wasn’t charity. It was justice. FDR taxed the robber barons and corrupt bankers who had crashed the economy and used that money to build roads, bridges, schools, power grids, and public institutions. He put millions to work—not in make-believe “job creators” fantasies, but in real jobs that built real things.

The result?
The largest middle class the world has ever seen.

For the first time in American history, working people could live with dignity. A single income could support a family. Homes were affordable. College was attainable. Retirement was possible. People weren’t one medical bill away from ruin. Why? Because we had workplace safety laws, a 40-hour workweek, strong unions, and a government that understood its job was to serve the many, not just the wealthy few.

And once people had some breathing room, they dared to ask for more.

Cleaner air and water.
Civil rights.
Women’s rights.
Worker protections.

For a brief, shining moment, America began dismantling the corporate oligarchy that had dominated its economy and politics since the Gilded Age.

And that’s when the backlash came.

The corporate elite were never going to accept democracy quietly. They launched a decades-long disinformation campaign equating unrestricted corporate profit with “freedom.” Regulation became “tyranny.” Taxes became “theft.” Government became the enemy.

Enter Ronald Reagan—a made-for-TV actor selling nostalgia like a detergent commercial. Reagan ushered in what could fairly be called the Project 2025 of its time: the systematic dismantling of the New Deal. Taxes on the wealthy were slashed. Social programs were gutted. Unions were crushed. Those who needed help were demonized as “welfare queens,” while corporations quietly collected billions in tax breaks and subsidies.

The scam worked.

It didn’t stop with Reagan. Both Bush administrations doubled down on trickle-down economics. And then came the ultimate betrayal: Bill Clinton, a Democrat, embracing neoliberalism—deregulating Wall Street, repealing Glass-Steagall, and letting financial institutions run wild. Boom, bust, repeat. Each crash made the rich richer and everyone else more precarious.

That’s how we got here.
That’s how Trump became possible.

So when Trump says “Make America Great Again,” what he really means is: Make America profitable again—for billionaires. Strip away the mythology, and MAGA isn’t about restoring greatness. It’s about finishing the job of dismantling the last guardrails protecting democracy, labor, and the middle class.

If we actually want to make America great again—not just for the rich, not just for the powerful, not just for those who already have everything—we don’t need a red hat or a strongman.

We need a new New Deal.

One that taxes extreme wealth.
One that invests in people.
One that treats housing, healthcare, education, and dignity as rights—not commodities.

America was great when government worked for the people.
It can be again—but only if we stop falling for slogans and start demanding substance.

Don’t let the “Trickle-Down” con artists leave you out in the rain: Hit like, share, and subscribe to help us keep the good trouble coming!

— Robert Cain, author of Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet.