would use to “teach the Japs Roman letters and Arabic numerals”). In a 1946 editorial devoted to “auditing” World War II, the News asked “what we got out of it” and concluded that it was only a string of Pacific islands to use as bases and temporary control of Japan (which the U.S. The News unapologetically promoted that way of seeing. “America first” retained a negative association when Trump adopted it during the 2016 campaign-but the candidate seemingly didn’t care, presumably because he thought it captured a view of foreign relations focused narrowly on what the U.S. In 1950, the tabloid’s top political columnist, John O’Donnell, argued that “the America First philosophy was soundly right” all along. entry into World War II, and he continued to promote the slogan in the News long after it had become associated with anti-Semites and fascist sympathizers.

The paper’s publisher, Joseph Medill Patterson, was a strong supporter of the isolationist America First Committee prior to the U.S. To head off the threat of globalist socialism, the News offered the same prescription as Trump for restoring the country’s greatness: an “America first” policy. to “buy the Presidency of the World by means of a worldwide WPA,” or Works Progress Administration, the Depression-era jobs program, which would eventually bring “some kind of Socialism or Communism to the United States.” The end goal of globaloney, the last of these editorials said, was for the U.S. The News especially liked Luce’s coinage “globaloney,” which was part of the headlines for three separate editorials in 1943. The News had yet another name for those “do-gooders.” It labeled them “globalists,” an obscure term that the News picked up from Representative Clare Boothe Luce (and Trump picked up from Steve Bannon). One editorial in 1957 blasted “do-gooders,” “world savers,” and “bleeding hearts” for their “giveaway convulsions”-their alleged desire to dish out billions of American taxpayers’ dollars to “Socialist, semi-Socialist, or Fascist countries.” Editorials said immigrants posed a danger to Americans, with one warning in 1945 that “foreigners … want to stream here in millions, share our comparative wealth, and pull down our standard of living.” A 1943 editorial arguing against the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act pinpointed what the News saw as the problem: “Official Washington is infested with do-gooders who want to let the rest of the world in on riches” and to “give away our country.” That notion permeated the editorial page throughout the ’40s and ’50s. embassy building.Įven though immigration in the 1940s was at historic lows and subject to the strictest laws in American history, the News called for further restriction. “The Red Hungarian bosses probably giggled into their cups,” an editorial told readers in 1965, when the State Department didn’t penalize the “bosses” after a mob damaged a U.S. Two decades later, the Communists were still laughing. A 1946 editorial cartoon, for example, showed a jovial Stalin kicking a drunk Uncle Sam in the seat of his pants as Sam buys another round of drinks (aid money) for the Soviet dictator and his comrades. The News also shared Trump’s concern that overly generous international deals made the U.S.

Trump has hammered away at the same message since the early days of his campaign last December he announced, “We’re no longer the suckers, folks.” and failing to pay enough for their own defense. Between 19, the Daily News editorial page and its politics column said dozens of times that Uncle Sam had turned into “Uncle Sap” or “Uncle Sucker,” because “so-called allies” in NATO were raking in aid money from the U.S. The overlap between Trump’s rhetoric and the mid-century News is especially striking when it comes to United States foreign policy. Indeed, the paper’s current left-wing politics have obscured the fact that it helped fashion a brand of right-wing populism in the years just before the president’s birth in 1946, and during his childhood, that Trump eventually rode to power. Trump, was a major advertiser in the News and frequently appeared in its real-estate columns in the 1940s and ’50s, young Donald might have encountered it regularly-and, though adult Donald may not realize the connection, he sounds eerily like it now.

But the News’ dominance was greatest in white, non-Jewish outer-borough neighborhoods such as Jamaica Estates, where the Trumps lived. In fact, no American newspaper has ever surpassed those numbers. The tabloid was at the time the highest-circulation newspaper in America by far, selling more than 2 million copies each weekday and as many as 4 million on Sundays. When Donald Trump was growing up in the 1950s, roughly half of the families in the New York metropolitan area read the New York Daily News.

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