This Black Science Fiction Writer Predicted Trump's Campaign Slogan 16 Years Ago
These four little words combined make a soundbite that has taken up a lot of airtime this election cycle: "Make America Great Again." The slogan has much different connotations than Hillary Clinton's "I'm With Her" or Barack Obama's "Yes We Can!" but it's still the rallying cry that has brought him millions of primary votes and propelled him to become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
Was it actually concocted by a black science fiction writer as the slogan for an evil Christian demagogue running for President?
In Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents, published in 1998, Texas Senator Andrew Steele Jarret uses the phrase as a way to shore up support among Evangelical voters. One Twitter user pointed out that Butler wrote the exact same phrase in her book on Thursday on Twitter.
Talents explores what happens when a demagogue is allowed to rise to quell the fears and anxieties that come along with living in a dystopian word where the government is powerless and people must fend for themselves.
The author, Octavia Butler, was a black woman and the first science fiction writer to ever win the MacArthur "Genius Grant." Butler died in 2006, two years before Trump would become host of NBC's Celebrity Apprentice.
As the excerpt from the book shows, Jarret riles up his supporters so much that they begin to harm anyone they think to be against them, including Muslims and Jews. Though Jarret condemns the hate violence, he "does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear."
Shawn Taylor, a Butler scholar, told Fusion the book shows "what happens when people are emboldened by a demagogue" and that Trump, like Jarret, gives people "permission to act on their worst impulses."
Trump's rallies have garnered a reputation for wanton violence. A hashtag, #SaferThanaTrumpRally even sprang up in response. And through it all, Trump has not condoned the violence and instead has parceled out blame — mostly to protesters. While Trump doesn't exactly say he condones the violence, considering paying the legal bills of violent rallygoers is the exact opposite of condemning violence.
According to The Hill, Trump claims he invented the phrase a year ago.
"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, according to The Hill.
Oh, and how does the book end? It turns out, as Butler writes in Talents, Jarret was "bad for business, bad for the U. S. Constitution, and bad for a large percentage of the population."
Donald Trump's campaign did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
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