Trump accuses New York Mayor DeBlasio of ‘stealing’ campaign slogan

President Donald Trump has blasted the New York mayor as having “no imagination” for pinching his 2020 campaign slogan: ‘Promises Made, Promises Kept’ in a tweet. Bill DeBlasio snapped back.

“Bill DeBlasio, the high taxing Mayor of NYC, just stole my campaign slogan: PROMISES MADE  PROMISES KEPT! That’s not at all nice. No imagination!” Trump tweeted on Tuesday morning.

DeBlasio displayed the phrase on Monday at a groundbreaking ceremony for a school in east New York, due to open in 2020.

His choice of phrase was confusing, as the mayor has been a vocal Trump critic, clashing with the president on immigration, climate change, and policing, where Trump accused DeBlasio of overly restricting the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk powers.

The Mayor responded right away, tweeting that “The difference is that I’m not lying when I say it.”

The Trump campaign rolled out the slogan in September 2017 in a video highlighting the president’s work in promoting vocational education. Since then, Trump has displayed the phrase on banners at his rallies, and his campaign has bought the domain promiseskept.com, with over two years to go until the 2020 election.

While Trump chided DeBlasio over his “lack of imagination,” his 2016 campaign slogan - ‘Make America Great Again’ - bore a striking similarity to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign slogan: ‘Let’s Make America Great Again.’ Like Trump’s campaign, Reagan’s played on economic distress, as the US economy at the time suffered from high unemployment, stagnation, inflation, and the after-effects of the 1970s Arab oil crisis.

“This is stupid,” a spokesman for DeBlasio told the New York Daily News in response, adding that he was not familiar with Trump’s use of the slogan. “This is not novel rhetoric… It’s not the most novel turn of phrase.”

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