The writer and academic offers a history of America First, one of Donald Trump’s campaign slogans. Although popular wisdom attributes the phrase to Charles Lindbergh and the isolationist America First Committee of 1940-1941, in fact the expression has a longer, and darker, history than that, a story of nativism and the Ku Klux Klan, of 100 % Americanism and isolationism, and of a homegrown fascism that America continues to pretend “can’t happen here.”
