What is ‘Make America Burn Again?’ The odd trending term, explained

When Kamala Harris announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her VP pick, “Make American Burn Again” trended on X, referring to how Walz handled Black social justice demonstrations in his home state of Minnesota after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officers in 2020.

According to Walz’s critics, he didn’t act swiftly enough to put down the unrest, which involved looting and arson in Minnesota’s largest city. According to The New York Times, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey asked Walz to approve National Guard deployment to help restore the peace. Walz gave the okay the next day, but some say Walz should have acted sooner, and that he waited because he was sympathetic to the protestors.

With “Make America Burn Again,” a riff on Trump’s now familiar MAGA slogan, Trump supporters seem to say that Walz as vice president, one step away from the presidency, would allow America to burn in a similar situation, as some say Walz did in Minneapolis when he delayed the National Guard in 2020.

However, Trump critics on X were quick to point out that if handling incidents of similar violence is a metric of a politician’s success, Trump’s record is no better, considering his reaction to the Jan. 6 insurrection — it’s much worse.

Where was the National Guard on Jan. 6?

Since Jan. 6, Trump has claimed that he offered to send in the National Guard, but then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi turned him down. Trump’s own military brass denies Trump’s version of the story. Meanwhile, Trump has said he supports the insurrectionists and even offered to pardon them if reelected, according to Politico. About a year before Tim Walz was announced as Kamala Harris’ VP pick, Trump was indicted on federal charges for his effort to overturn the 2016 election, of which inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection is just a part.

Minneapolis arson and right-wing politics

Moreover, it’s also untrue that the Minneapolis violence during the Black social justice demonstrations came from far-left activists, as the “Make America Burn Again” trending term suggests. Take Ivan Harrison Hunter, a self-described “Boogaloo Boi,” an online right-wing movement, who drove from Texas to Minneapolis to take part in the riots.

Two years after the demonstrations, Hunter was sentenced to three years in prison on federal rioting charges. And specifically, for firing shots into the Minneapolis police precinct that burned, among the most dramatic examples of arson to take place in the city. Hunter also said online that he “set fire to that precinct with the Black community,” referring to the Minneapolis demonstrations, according to The Guardian. Additionally, the same month Hunter was sentenced, Dylan Shakespeare Robinson received four years in prison for setting the blaze and was ordered to pay $12 million in restitution, The New York Times reported.

The social justice demonstrations in 2020 and the Jan. 6 insurrection are too complicated to summarize in trending terms, nor can they be compared. But since MAGA brought it up, we agree with David Ferguson, who responded to the “Make America Burn Again” on X, “Do the people trending ‘Make America Burn Again’ realize who was president at that point?”