Is Donald Trump the Founding Father of America First?

On Monday, July 15, Georgia US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene delivered one of the first speeches at the Republican National Convention. It was filled with false and misleading statements – not the least of which was that Donald Trump is “the founding father of the America First Movement”

Donald Trump’s America First Movement is a reboot of a far right political party founded in 1943 by pro-Nazi fascists. The original members of the pre-war America First Committee included Robert Wood (CEO of Sears, Roebuck and Co.), Henry Ford, and Charles Lindbergh. All were raging anti-semites who used their celebrity to defend Adolph Hitler and keep the US from joining Great Britain in the war in Europe. Wood, Ford and Lindbergh left the organization after Pearl Harbor and the Committee disbanded. But the pro-Nazi fascists at the heart of the original America First movement quietly continued to pursue the end of democracy in the US.

In 1942, thirty Nazi sympathizers, mostly US citizens, were charged with sedition under the Smith Act of 1940. The investigation, indictments, and ultimately the trial were undermined by more than two dozen members of Congress who were implicated in promoting Nazi propaganda that came directly from Germany. The first prosecutor was fired, and the judge assigned to the case died while the trial was hijacked by multiple defense lawyers. A mistrial was declared. The second prosecutor assigned to re-prosecute the case was also fired, after US Senators pressured their old colleague, President Harry Truman.

Disciples of Christ Minister, white supremacist, anti-Semite and Christian nationalist, Gerald L. K. Smith founded the America First Party in 1943. He attempted to get Charles Lindbergh to be the party Presidential nominee but failed. After taking the nomination for himself, Smith attempted to recruit Republican Governor of Ohio, John Bricker, to be his running mate. This also failed and Bricker was replaced with Harry Romer, a protégée of Father Charles Coughlin, an antisemitc, pro-Nazi Catholic priest.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt won re-election by an electoral landslide in 1944, and the America First Party faded. But an America First Party candidate has been on the ballot for President multiple times since 1944. The last time was in 1996, when Ralph Forbes, previously a campaign manager for David Duke and an officer of the American Nazi Party, was the nominee.

Allies of the original America First movement were involved with Senator Joseph McCarthy during his crusade against communism in the early 1950s. Pro-Nazi fascists had used opposition to communism as a reason to overturn the war crime convictions of Nazis in the late 1940s. They blamed Jewish lawyers for the “unfair” convictions and equated Jews with communists. And so, most of those named as communists by McCarthy were Jewish. There is evidence suggesting that McCarthy’s original list of 205 communists working in the State Department in 1950 was completely fabricated.

So it turns out that the America First movement has its roots in white supremacy, antisemitism and Christian nationalism. Does Donald Trump know the history? Probably not. But shouldn’t one of his advisors have told him? Or do they know the truth?