Reagan's plan to 'make America great again'

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. The phrase Make America great again is indelibly associated with President Trump. Yet a very similar version of the slogan, Let's Make America Great Again, was in fact used by his 1980s predecessor, Ronald Reagan. What can this parallel tell us about the United States of the 1980s? And does drawing comparisons between the two reveal anything about the US today?

Author and documentarian Phil Tinline explored these questions in a recent BBC Sounds programme called Ronald V. Donald, and he spoke to Matt Elton about what he learned. Phil, thank you for being with us today. We are talking about a time when a US president was associated with the phrase, make America great again, and the US economy was very much in the spotlight.

Can you, to start, fill us in on which president we're talking about and the use of that slogan, which I think may come as a surprise to some listeners. Yes, we are talking about President Ronald Reagan, who won election in 1980 and then won elections with a spectacularly big majority in 1984, where he won every single state bar his opponents' home state of Minnesota and Washington, DC. And he used this slogan, which is subtly different. to from Make America Great Again, but is obviously essentially the same. In the 1980 campaign, the slogan was Let's Make America Great Again.

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