Is America's Olympic dominance bad for Donald Trump?

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published 19 August 2016

You may have heard: Donald Trump wants to Make America Great Again. And as a regular rebuttal line, his rival Hillary Clinton and her surrogates have been asserting that America is already, in fact, great.

So who gets to be the foremost authority on America's maybe-maybe not greatness? Trump better hope voters don't turn to the Rio Olympics to make their decisions on the matter: As of Friday morning, the U.S. leads the gold medal count with 35, 13 more than second-place Great Britain, and leads the overall medal count with 100, which is 42 more than second-place China. And after all, what is a massive haul of gold medals (and some silver and bronze, of course) but a gleaming sign of greatness?

Moreover, this dominance by Team USA at the summer Games might be driving Trump — whose Twitter trigger finger is usually always ready to fire — away from his most effective messaging system, Politico's Alex Goldstein theorizes. "The Olympics is about the worst thing that could have happened to the Trump train," Goldstein writes. "'Make America Great Again has never felt more out-of-touch than it does against the backdrop of tenacious, over-achieving American athletes." And U.S. athletes in Rio have been taking thinly veiled shots at Trump's rhetoric as the victories mount, too — read it all at Politico.