If you look at all his impulses and instincts, you can trace them back to this particular period, which happens to be right before he went bankrupt and got divorced. Leon Trotsky once developed the concept of “uneven and combined development” to explain how capitalism matures in different places and how features of an advanced economy can exist alongside retrograde technology, institutions, and practices. I wonder if we shouldn’t also think about the uneven and combined development of Trump’s brain.
Consider: Trump recently referred to St. Petersburg as Leningrad, a name that the city has not borne for over 30 years. Some suspect his tendency to lavish praise and respect on Putin is because he’s a Kremlin asset, but I think, on some level, he believes he’s still dealing with the Soviet Union. Russia is a “big power,” as he puts it. The pageantry of the recent meeting with the Russian leader comes straight out of the late Cold War summits of Reagan and H.W. Bush. Not for nothing does the late Cold War align precisely with when Trump was at his first peak. In 1987, he even met General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.
Then there’s trade. Trump is obsessed with tariffs. When did this preoccupation publicly emerge? Well, in the late 1980s. In 1987, he took out a full-page ad in the Times, complaining that, “For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.” The open letter is primarily focused on the supposedly unfair trading practices of the Japanese, who are said to be “ripping off” America and must be “made to pay.” At the time, this was not an unusual opinion. There were dozens of books and articles that portrayed Japan as a rising economic power that threatened to overtake the United States. Politicians from Paul Tsongas to Pat Buchanan used Japan-bashing as part of their appeals to the public. Trump was just parroting a line that was part of the common sense of that era, along with gripes about South Korea and West Germany, as well. Of course, that all seems a little silly now since Japan’s bubble economy burst, and it has stagnated ever since. But Trump’s attitude to foreign trade seems to have been forged in that period of anxiety over American decline.