Former supporter accuses ‘dirtbag’ Trump of stealing ‘Keep America Great’ slogan

Former president Donald Trump is accused of stealing his "Keep America Great" 2020 re-election slogan from a retired entrepreneur who submitted it to his campaign website.

Jeff Paul, then a Trump supporter, says he sent the proposed slogan to the campaign one week before Trump took office in 2017.

Paul received an automated response saying the campaign would be in touch with him. A few days later, Trump announced in an interview with the Washington Post that "Keep America Great" would be his 2020 re-election slogan.

“I thought, ‘You dirty bastard,'" Paul told the Daily Beast for a story published Tuesday.

"And with that thought, Paul kicked off a crusade to claim the rights to what would eventually become Trump’s on-again, off-again, quasi-official 2020 campaign slogan," the Daily Beast reports. "The dispute, which dragged on in one form or another for more than four years, has all the trademarks of a Trump legal war. For decades, the real estate tycoon has zealously deployed an army of lawyers—some of them ethically challenged—to bully courtroom opponents into submission with some combination of threats, stonewalling, countersuits, and other dilatory tactics, outspending them until they’re bled dry. And here, like so many of Trump’s relationships with former allies, the little guy invariably gets burned."

Paul, who says he now considers Trump a "dirtbag," eventually sued the former president's campaign in trademark court.

"But we’ll never know what a judge would say," the Daily Beast reports. "That’s because over the next year, Trump’s legal team—true to form—filed extension after extension, kicking the case down the road until just a few weeks before Election Day, when the campaign was all but over. ... Then, last spring, Paul conceded defeat. He withdrew his case on May 4 and—nearly $100,000 in the hole—called it a day."

Read the full story.