Mr. Trump’s ’80s were, until now, his glory years, when he built Trump Tower, published “The Art of the Deal” and called the tabloids on himself using a made-up name, John Barron. He was routinely flattered in the tabloids thanks to the excellent public relations skills of Mr. Barron, popped up regularly on TV and wrestling promotions and started making movie cameos. Urban elites looked down on him — Spy magazine called him a “short-fingered vulgarian” — but he embodied what many people who weren’t rich thought rich people looked like, lived like, and, in his shamelessness and selfishness, acted like.
More important for us now, his formative understanding of politics seems to have been shaped by that era, when America, humbled by the Vietnam War, Watergate, crime and the oil crisis, was stuck with a cardigan-wearing president who suggested that we all turn down our thermostats for the collective good. Reagan told us to turn the thermostat way up, live large and swagger again. Hippies became yuppies, at least in the media’s imagination.
Many people who watched Oliver Stone’s morality tale “Wall Street” missed the satire in the “greed is good” speech and moved to New York hoping to become the next Gordon Gekko, or at least live like him. At the time, the real-life Wall Street executive Michael Milken, who would later go to prison for securities fraud, was a national celebrity. (Trump pardoned Mr. Milken in 2020.) The takeaway for young people was easy: Any kind of moralism around moneymaking was regarded as uncool, or possibly even un-American. Mr. Trump embodied this archetype. He told a story about himself that in typical Trump fashion laundered his history as a beneficiary of nepotism who began his career with a few million dollars of help from Dad and often suggested that he had made it in New York City with the pluck and determination of Dolly Parton in “9 to 5.”
Yes, there was talk at the time of Trump running for president. But it came across mostly as an exercise in brand-building. Certainly, no one imagined that he would be seriously proposing that America annex Greenland and Canada. But if you understand that his worldview is permanently frozen in the ’80s it explains, in addition to his fondness for Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Village People, that many of his foreign policy notions were largely formulated through the lens of the Cold War, in which two superpowers negotiated a state of peace via mutual deterrence. The opposing power is no longer Russia, however; it’s China. Like Reagan, Mr. Trump is championing a “Star Wars”-like missile shield project, an Iron Dome, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is in charge of putting together.
The slogan that Mr. Trump cribbed directly from Reagan, “Make America Great Again,” speaks to a longing for a revival. Reagan was mad at many of the same things Mr. Trump is — affirmative action, regulation, big government, high taxes, the Panama Canal, the Department of Education — but this time Mr. Trump, abetted by Elon Musk’s squad of former interns, some still not old enough to legally drink, is doing more damage to those institutions and policies more quickly than Reagan ever did. Reagan, just like Mr. Trump, was often callous about people he did not see as important: To use one notorious example, members of his administration joked about the AIDS epidemic and abetted its destruction by initially refusing to do anything about it, stigmatizing it as a disease its victims deserved. (Mr. Trump’s move against the United States Agency for International Development, among many other things, has already halted treatments for H.I.V. patients in poor countries.)
