Trump didn’t invent ‘prime the pump’

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has taken credit for coining the phrase “prime the pump,” seemingly unaware that it was popularized during the Great Depression. He tells The Economist magazine he “came up with it a couple of days ago, and I thought it was good.”

The Merriam-Webster dictionary people quickly tweeted that the phrase “priming the pump” has been around since the early 1800s. It became popular in the 1930s when Franklin Roosevelt flushed money into the economy to fight the Depression.