Donald Trump and his movement might seem like the quintessential example of backward-looking politics. Their motto, after all, is “Make America Great Again.” Precisely when it was great isn’t exactly clear; sometime in the past, before all those minorities got so uppity (or became majorities), when women knew their place and America built things. Nostalgia seems to animate Trump’s mind. Was it merely a coincidence that Escape From Alcatraz was on TV the night before he tweeted about reopening that doleful island for business? Trump knows what he’s doing, saying it’s “a sad symbol, but it’s a symbol of law and order.” If he could make John Wayne head of the Department of Homeland Security, he would. Trump himself is another “sad symbol”—of chintzy 1980s glamour that the swells believed had gone out of fashion. No such luck.
So past-focused is Trumpism’s appeal that some writers have concluded that it lacks any positive vision of the future. In a recent essay, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor identified Trumpism with what they called “end times fascism,” a bunker mentality: “The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.” That’s not exactly wrong, but perhaps it’s only part of the story. In 2016, when Trump carried the over-65 vote, the idea that he was a pure throwback might have been more plausible. But this time around, he attracted support from more young people—who have more of a future than a past—than hidebound Republicans usually do. And then there’s the fact that Silicon Valley oligarchs—who believe they have been called to build the future—gravitated to him.
Rather than simple nostalgia, Trump’s appeal derives in large part from the way he combines past and future, classic and modern, restoration and revolution. One of his earliest Silicon Valley investors, Peter Thiel, picked up on this back in 2017. “There are reduced expectations for the younger generation, and this is the first time this has happened in American history,” Thiel said. “Even if there are aspects of Trump that are retro…a lot of people want to go back to a past that was futuristic—The Jetsons, Star Trek. They’re dated but futuristic.” Futuristic but familiar, though more “Meet George Orwell” than “Meet George Jetson.” In his 1990 book Surviving at the Top, Trump identifies himself as highly conventional and even somewhat staid, “a man with very simple tastes—not in building design, perhaps, but in most other things.” Manhattan, with its topless towers, always represented an escape from Fred Trump’s retro-drab Queens, with its squat lower-middle-class duplexes and Jamaica Estates’ faux-Tudor stodginess.