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A Newer Seward
Donald Trump revives 19th-century imperialism
A lot of authors have made the case that Donald Trump is, in many ways, trying to take America back to the ‘80s.
This is, after all, a man who invited Hulk Hogan to the Republican Convention, who loves the glitzy gold-and-black aesthetic of Wall Street, and would certainly agree with Gordon Gekko’s assertion that “greed is good.” He’s always believed in the decade’s ethos that more is more, that there’s no shame in excess. Heck, Trump even just announced that he’s going to restart a version of Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No campaign, launching an advertising campaign to tell people “how bad drugs are for you,” pretending that this is a new idea: “nobody’s done that before.”
But lately, Trump has been making me wonder if I’ve been thinking about the right decade in the wrong century — maybe he actually wants to go back to the 1880s, not the 1980s.
One of Trump’s signature campaign promises was to revive the protectionist economic policies of the late 1800s. He’s stopped praising Ronald Reagan as much as he used to and now says a lot of nice things about William McKinley (musing recently about changing the name of Denali back to Mount McKinley to honor his hero). I suppose it’s not surprising that a man who has spent his whole life devoted to surface-level glitz can’t…
