On a North Carolina tarmac last week, President Donald Trump reminded the country that MAGA’s preferred version of America is one from a bygone era.
The occasion was a rally to bolster U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley (R), who trails the Democratic nominee Roy Cooper consistently in polls and risks a loss that could cost Republicans the majority. Rather than outline a vision for tomorrow, Trump’s pitch leaned on the party’s most shopworn frameworks: law and order’s tough-on-crime posturing, the Southern Strategy’s exploitation of racial division, and the infamous intersection of the two — the Willie Horton ad, which first aired 38 years ago this week.
Trump spent most of the night attacking Cooper, the former governor, over a court-ordered settlement to reduce the state’s prison population during the covid-19 pandemic. He likened it to the Massachusetts prison furlough of Horton, a Black man convicted of murder and rape whose crimes became a central issue in the 1988 presidential election. In a commercial that’s now a cornerstone of dog-whistle politics, a Republican-affiliated PAC sought to gain ground on Democratic nominee and governor Michael Dukakis by pinning Horton’s violent spree on him. It worked. “Dukakis took a rousing lead of 15 points,” Trump told the crowd, “and lost the election in the landslide because of that one advertisement.”
Reaching back four decades for a campaign attack line underscores that Trump and MAGA champion a backward-looking politics less interested in the country’s future than in resurrecting its past. The slogan “Make America Great Again” itself is further evidence: Political scientists have found that the phrase evokes national nostalgia, and Trump’s 2016 campaign fused that sentiment with hard-line nationalism and strongman rule. This is a signature of revanchist movements, usually fueled by grievances, an obsession with redeeming a perceived loss of status, and the desire to reverse progress and restore an old order.
The signs are everywhere. In North Carolina, Trump banked on a replay of 1988. On racial equality, his agenda against diversity, equity and inclusion looks to the pre-civil-rights 1940s, aiming to roll back decades of statutory and constitutional protections. His immigration policy echoes the Immigration Act of 1924, which set in place discriminatory racial quotas for decades. His reliance on punitive tariffs revives the aggressive protectionism of the early 20th century. And his foreign policy channels the imperial ambition of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. Trump’s America of tomorrow is a bad reenactment of yesterday’s United States.
Looking to history is a smart practice for presidents. It holds lessons on how past challenges were resolved and how previous policies failed. The best presidents learn from history to help the country evolve and chart a course to becoming a more perfect union. But some treat history like a road map backward, hoping to redeem elements of the past by remaking the future in its image. In this rendering, the nation’s best days were yesterday; for revanchists, it signals a lost providence that they must reclaim.
Trump’s fixation on bygone eras, though, is out of step. Most Americans are focused on today’s problems — high gas prices and cost-of-living increases — and thinking about the future, such as social mobility and the role of artificial intelligence. And where they believe things were once better — for example, 41 percent say the American Dream was once possible but no longer is — they also understand that many groups were long excluded from the pathways to the middle class, especially women, minorities and immigrants.
For MAGA, greatness inevitably points to an era where the very people targeted by today’s anti-DEI and deportation agenda were blocked from fair access to democracy, opportunity and due process. Trump activates these cultural grievances and mixes them with populist appeals that portray some groups as doing better than others, not as natural by-products of capitalism or meritocracy, but as a result of partisan patronage and ethno-nationalism.
MAGA’s love of the past also has a selective memory. For all of the North Carolina crowd’s enthusiasm for law and order and exhuming of the Willie Horton ad’s exploitation of racial fears, Trump released thousands of people from federal prison through the First Step Act, a signature achievement of his first term. “This second chance at life,” Trump remarked in 2020, “is made possible because we passed landmark criminal justice reform into law.”
To date, the law has allowed more than 65,000 inmates to leave prison early, nearly 20 times as many as were released early by Cooper under the court settlement. Yet, in Trump’s telling, Cooper was soft on crime while his own similar efforts are to be celebrated. And his pardoning of convicted Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists, several of whom reoffended — including one man who is serving a life sentence for molesting two children — goes unmentioned.
Trump’s appeal to the past will be tested in North Carolina this fall; it doesn’t look promising. Whatever the outcome, though, MAGA’s politics will remain mired in cultural and historical grievances — flying blind because it can’t take its eyes off the rearview and offering little inspiration for a country worried about today and less optimistic about tomorrow. By grounding its appeal in bygone eras, MAGA delivers a bygone politics, better suited for relitigating bruised egos than managing modern realities.
The post Trump wants to make America 1988 again appeared first on Washington Post.
