Trump's closing pitch to voters admits that America has to be made 'great again' all over again

In the closing days of the 2020 election that opinion polls show him likely to lose, President Trump has amended his famous 2016 campaign slogan, promising that, if reelected, he will “make America great again, again.”

That subtle tweak was debuted on July 17 by Vice President Mike Pence.

Since then, Trump himself has begun slipping it into his stump speech, as he did Monday in Arizona, a once reliably Republican state now considered in play in the contest between Trump and Democrat Joe Biden.

“You know it’s make America great again, right?” Trump told his crowd in Tucson. “I say ‘make America great again, again’ … again, again. We did it and now we had to do it again. It’s all right, it’s happening.”

Inherent in that revision is Trump’s apparent admission that the American greatness he promised in 2016 is still a work in progress.

“We built the greatest economy ever. We had to close it down,” Trump said. “We saved millions of lives by doing what we did. Then we built it back up, and now we’re doing record-type numbers.”

That stumbling block on the road to American greatness, of course, was the coronavirus pandemic, which, as of Tuesday afternoon, has killed more than 220,000 Americans, put millions of people out of work, sent the U.S. economy into recession and even sickened the president and his family.

Democrats are quick to point out that when Trump took office, he was handed an economy on the rise. Prior to the pandemic, job gains under Trump, while strong, trailed those tallied in the final months of Barack Obama’s second term. Biden, meanwhile, has frequently made the case that Trump’s inept handling of the pandemic has worsened the impact on public health and the economy.

“Amazingly, he still hasn’t grasped the most basic fact of this crisis: To fix the economy, we need to get control of the virus,” Biden said in a June speech in Lancaster, Pa.

But as Trump did in 2016, when he vowed that “I alone can fix” what ailed the country, the president’s closing argument in the 2020 home stretch is that his reelection is necessary for America’s recovery.

“This election is a choice between a Trump super-recovery or a Biden depression, if he even gets to run,” Trump said Monday in Tucson.