RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald J. Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is racist. What seemed like an inclusive, inspiring call to national renewal really is a cry for Caucasian power.

How do we know this? Bill Clinton said so.

“If you’re a white Southerner, you know exactly what it means, don’t you?” Clinton told voters in Orlando, Fla., on Wednesday. “What it means is, ‘I’ll give you the economy you had 50 years ago, and I’ll move you back up on the social totem pole, and other people down.”

But wait.

On Friday morning, Fox & Friends excavated several examples of when this divisive, cruel, ugly motto was deployed to whip up white hate by none other than . . . William Jefferson Clinton.

“I believe that, together, we can make America great again,” Bill Clinton said in Little Rock, Ark., in 1991.

Standing before a flapping American flag, with his appropriately white shirt sleeves rolled up, Bill Clinton addressed voters in 1992. He promised “to secure a better future for your children and your grandchildren and to make America great again.”

Clinton also looked straight into a camera that year and said, “I want to attack these problems and make America great again.”

“It’s time for another comeback,” Bill Clinton said in a radio ad for his wife’s 2008 U.S. Senate campaign. “Time to make America great again.”

Now that my Fox News Channel colleagues have hog-tied Bill Clinton with archived video and audio tape, perhaps he will dump his utterly absurd and disgusting charge that there is anything even microscopically racist, biased, or even snooty about the words “Make America Great Again.” This phrase is perfectly innocuous, and Trump is just the latest of many candidates to use it.

While Clinton, his wife, and their Democratic surrogates may drop this one foolish argument, they most assuredly will not stop trying to split the country with grotesque ethnic appeals and ludicrous “updates” on how Trump and the GOP are itching to advance white supremacy, if not reinstate segregation.

The Democrats play the race card, again and again, since it’s the last one left in their deck.

The Democrats cannot run on the Obama-Clinton economy, which is growing at an annual rate of 0.95 percent. The Democratic recovery is the weakest in 67 years. That is, since 1949.

The Democrats cannot run on Obamacare, which Hillary Clinton calls “one of the greatest accomplishments of President Obama, of the Democratic party, and of our country.” Premiums have soared 26.4 percent, on average, in the 14 states that have approved next year’s prices. Among 23 state-level Obamacare co-ops, 16 have collapsed, from Oregon to South Carolina. Health insurers are stampeding out of Obama’s vaunted exchanges, leaving Obamacare consumers with a choice of exactly one carrier in 31 percent of U.S. counties. (The map below notwithstanding, Pinal County, Ariz. had zero Obamacare plans lined up for 2017, until Blue Cross Blue Shield changed its mind and decided to stick around, lest that jurisdiction’s residents face no Obamacare coverage.) Miles from its stated destination, the Obamacare jalopy is careening into a ravine.

The Democrats cannot run on peace and stability while the Middle East is in flames. Early Friday morning, North Korea tested its brawniest atomic bomb yet, unleashing a 5.3-magnitude earthquake in the process. Iran’s ayatollahs count the $1.7 billion in Swiss francs and other currencies in cold, hard cash that Obama laundered and then delivered to them by jet. Tehran returned the favor by deploying naval vessels to menace U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf. American prestige is so in tatters, thanks to the Obama-Clinton “Lead from Behind” doctrine, that the president of the Philippines this week publicly called the president of the United States “a son of a whore.”

(Update: Proving, yet again, that one cannot type quickly enough to chronicle the Obama-Clinton scandals and failures, between writing the rough and final drafts of this op-ed piece, Representative Jeb Hensarling (R., Texas) told Fox News’s Bill Hemmer that Obama secretly has sent the ayatollahs cash and gold totaling $33.6 billion. “I believe that is a fact,” Hensarling said. “I have no evidence to the contrary.”)

The Democrats cannot run on competence as veterans literally drop dead waiting for medical treatment in the heartless VA system. Also, federal bureaucrats literally have been caught watching pornography on their computers. They kept their jobs, as did Drug Enforcement Agency staffers who cavorted with prostitutes in Colombia — paid for by the drug cartels. Such abuses and unaccountability reflect the same contempt for the taxpayers that Obama has shown since he took office. As Hillary Clinton cheered, Obama turbocharged the national debt from $10.6 trillion to $19.5 trillion — up 84 percent.

And the Democrats cannot run on honesty and transparency as Hillary Clinton now faces investigations for perjury and obstruction of justice, thanks to her abuse of state secrets through her outlaw, unsecure, private e-mail server.

The Democrats’ bandwagon now runs on just one cylinder. So, rather than bring Americans together, expect the party that launched the Ku Klux Klan to scream “Racism!” non-stop between now and Election Day.

— Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a contributing editor with National Review Online.