MAGA? When Trump thinks America was great

President Trump:

“How bad were the Academy Awards this year?” the president said, throwing up his hands as the crowd roared at his rally in Colorado Springs. “Did you see? And the winner is a movie from South Korea. What the hell was that all about?”

“Parasite,” the acclaimed thriller by Bong Joon Ho about class tensions boiling over in a wealthy family’s home, this month became the first film not in the English language to win the Academy Award for best picture in the 92-year history of the competition.

The film also won best director, original screenplay and international feature, marking a moment of pride for many Asian-Americans and a turning point in the academy’s long history of embracing stories told by white filmmakers.

“We’ve got enough problems with South Korea, with trade,” he said. “On top of it, they give them the best movie of the year? Was it good? I don’t know"...

“Let’s get ‘Gone With the Wind.’ Can we get, like, ‘Gone With the Wind’ back, please?” he said, lauding the 1939 romantic saga set in the South around the Civil War, which won a host of Academy Awards, including best picture...

Rob's comment:

Gee, I wonder why Donald Trump likes a 1939 movie set during the Civil War and not a 2019 South Korean movie? Which of course he hasn't seen.

When was America great? Trump told the NY Times:

"If you look back, it really was, there was a period of time when we were developing at the turn of the century which was a pretty wild time for this country and pretty wild in terms of building that machine, that machine was really based on entrepreneurship," he told the Times. Trump also pointed to the "late '40s and '50s," a time when, he said, "we were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war, we were pretty much doing what we had to do."

The "turn of the century," before labor unions and when monopolies controlled "the machine," when black people couldn't vote in the South, where lynching was a regular occurrence, and when housing and employment discrimination were the norm in the North. 

This is a Fox News version of history, but, you understand, it has nothing to do with racism.

Maureen Dowd in today's NY Times (America's Parasite):

Our president is nostalgic for a movie romanticizing slavery and a movie about an aging diva swanning maniacally around a mansion, living in a vanished past. (I am big. It’s the party that got small.)

Trump’s xenophobic movie criticism, combined with his mocking pronunciation of the name “Buttigieg,” harked back to the days when George H.W. Bush ran in 1988 wrapped in the flag, saying he was on “the American side,” while his celebrity endorser Loretta Lynn complained that she couldn’t even pronounce the name Dukakis. Too foreign-sounding...

And in his Vegas rally on Friday, Trump was again calling his predecessor “Barack Hussein Obama.”