In 1900, 40-percent of Americans lived in poverty, 7-percent graduated from high school, and 3-percent from college. Women were chattel. That means they belonged to a man: father, husband, brother, etc. Children as young as seven could be sold into a form of slavery called servitude and in some states that included legal prostitution. Even in states where prostitution was illegal, few ever did anything to save those children sold into that life by their poor parents.
How educated is the United States today? In 2014, 90.83-percent of Americans had a high school diploma or GED, and 44.08 percent had an associate and/or bachelor’s degree.
Since Trump doesn’t read, he doesn’t know this or doesn’t care, and that there is no time in American history that we were greater than we were in the 1960s.
If we look at the chart in this Atlantic piece, we discover America was greatest between 1960-1970, the Civil Rights Era; and when labor union membership was at its highest.
In fact, “Middle-Class Decline Mirrors The Fall of Unions In One Chart” we discover that the middle class was best off at the high point of union membership in 1967.
Now imagine if Trump was a reader and he was actually educated and knew all this and his make “America Great Again” was to return the U.S. to the 1960s, but without a war like the one in Vietnam.
That will never happen, because the malignant narcissist in the White House links his presidency to America Being Great Again. Nothing else counts to Donald Trump. He thinks that once he was elected and sworn in, the United States was Great Again.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
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Lloyd Lofthouse 
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