Donald Trump Goes Back to the Future

When exactly does the Republican nominee think America was great? The answer is: A long time before anyone currently living was born

Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump, reacts to the crowd as he concludes a campaign rally on October 19, 2024, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party and transformation of it in his own image was powered by a particularly potent form of political nostalgia. That was obvious the moment Trump chose “Make America Great Again” as his campaign slogan nine years ago.

But when did he think America was great? To what point in the past was he hoping to return the country?

At first, lots of people assumed the answer was the 1950s, the Reaganite right’s preferred Golden Age of unapologetic and unambivalent hostility to communism, along with support for traditional family values prior to the chaos and confusion of the 1960s counterculture and its aftermath. Yet Trump also spoke a language with roots going back further, to the 1930s—to the age of “America First” foreign policy and immigration restrictionism. Did Trump ultimately want to lead the country back to the pre-World War II era?

Through Trump single term as president, it seemed the answer might be Yes.

As the 2024 campaign enters its final phase, it’s clearer than ever that Trump’s vision of the American future resembles nothing so much as the “long” 19th century stretching from the election of President Andrew Jackson in 1828 on down to the 1930s. This was an era of rancorous fights that on one occasion sparked a literal civil war and at others produced civic turbulence that merely threated to tear the country apart. It was a period of economic “takeoff” when the country became an industrial powerhouse while also enduring unprecedented strikes and labor-related violence. It was a time before America took up the burden of serving as the world’s arsenal of democracy and bulwark of freedom against totalitarian tyranny and merely acted in the world in pursuit of its national interests, narrowly defined.

I’ve written about aspects of this before, focused specifically on echoes in our own time of events and political themes from the 1870s and ’80s. But I think it’s possible to go broader to see Trump’s slogan about making America great again involving a more radical form of nostalgia than is usually recognized—one that aims to return the country to an alternative comprehensive reality rooted even more deeply in the past.

Trump’s 19th Century