By promising in his inauguration speech on January 20 that“From this day a new vision will govern our country […], it will be America first ”, the new American president did not use neutral language.
For American historian Eric Rauchway, it is as if Trump had said: “America Above All”, or an adaptation of the infamous slogan of Hitler’s Germany.
Nazi sympathizers
And for good reason, in the columns of Washington Post, the historian emphasizes that the expression “America first” has been “Forged at the end of the 1930s by American Nazi sympathizers”.
It was notably used by the America First Committee, an isolationist organization founded in September 1940, one of whose most famous megaphones was the aviator Charles Lindbergh, and which militated against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt against the American commitment. in World War II.
At the time, Lindbergh believed that “Democracy was over in Europe, that the Western powers could not resist the Nazi war machine and that the United States had an interest in making a pact with Adolf Hitler”, recalls the historian.
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