The Roots of Trump Nostalgia

Jonathan Chait has a long   lament   in New York magazine about the diminishing intensity of anti-Trump politics in America. Even as the former president shoulders his way toward the Republican nomination and leads President Biden in many polls, Chait frets that “the imperative to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has become tiresome.” Indeed, a kind of “exhaustion” with anti-Trumpism, Chait writes, “may be the most dominant attribute of our national mood.”

His essay goes on to interpret this exhaustion as more psychological and even spiritual than simply political. Chait argues that the general mood in Biden’s America has become untethered from the reality of material conditions, as many Americans have embraced “an immutable belief in economic decline that no real-world statistical improvement can dislodge.” And he suggests that the defense of liberalism against authoritarian populism is always prone to fractures and fatal shrugs — because authoritarianism can invoke the apocalypse and promise utopia while rallying a determined minority, even as liberal politics is stuck trying to maintain a united pan-ideological front based only on an “appeal to maintaining the system with all its flaws.”

It’s a very interesting piece, and I think that the framework of exhaustion captures something important about the path to a potential Donald Trump restoration. The way that so many anti-Trump Republican donors and politicians seemed to essentially give up on the hope of a competitive primary once Trump was indicted and Ron DeSantis didn’t set the world on fire fits this framework. So does the way that the Democratic Party has seemingly sleepwalked into renominating Biden despite his lousy polling numbers and obvious age-related issues.

But I also think more than just exhaustion is at work here, and that some of the different groups Chait identifies as insufficiently anti-Trump — left-wingers, establishment Republicans, pocketbook-conscious swing voters — are actually experiencing something that might be more accurately characterized as a kind of Trump nostalgia.

This is not the nostalgia of the zealous Trump supporter; these constituencies are all either unenthused about or actively hostile to Trump himself. But they all have certain reasons to look back on the Trump presidency, or at least its prepandemic phase, and find features that they miss, things they feel like the Biden era hasn’t delivered, aspects of the past that they wish would return.

Start with left-wingers, who obviously don’t miss Trump’s policies   but who might miss the sense of possibility that his chaotic administration opened up. While moderate liberals tended to experience the first Trump administration as a time of existential dread and permanent crisis, for their progressive and socialist brethren, the crisis sometimes felt like a unique opportunity: a vindication for their structural critiques of the American political system, a chance to seize greater ideological power within liberal institutions, a fluid, contradiction-heightening political moment potentially ripe for the ascent of a figure like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

The Trump years gave progressives an accelerating Great Awokening, a new array of left-wing litmus tests for Democratic politicians and a set of grand policy ambitions that even the moderate Joe Biden felt obliged to partially embrace. By contrast, the Biden years have given us a modest anti-woke backlash, the collision between the left’s grand plans and inflationary realities and a dissipation of socialist energy that’s left Sanders without a clear successor.

I don’t think that contrast makes most left-wingers consciously want Trump back in office. But I do think that subconscious nostalgia can be powerful.

Then there’s the nostalgia of those establishment Republicans who dislike Trump but also don’t want Democrats in power. For them, much of the Trump presidency was experienced as a pleasant policy surprise. Throughout the 2016 campaign they recoiled from his demagoguery, but they also worried that he wouldn’t govern as their kind of conservative, that he would make unpredictable judicial picks, abandon American military commitments and cut big bipartisan deals with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. But instead, Trump was a weak chief executive who let Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell run domestic policy, and who staffed his foreign policy offices with military men and traditional hawks like John Bolton.

This meant that no matter what Trump tweeted or what corrupt things he tried to do, for much of his presidency, establishment and business-class Republicans felt as if they were — to some degree, at least — in charge of the American government, getting exactly the judges they wanted, arming Ukraine and supporting Israel, passing a very traditional Republican tax cut. (And if they didn’t get sweeping spending cuts or dramatic entitlement reform, well, they didn’t get those with George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, either.) Throughout, Trump’s general haplessness eased their fears about his authoritarianism, helping convince them that he was dangerous, sure, but also ultimately under their control.

The shock of Jan. 6, 2021, temporarily undid this conviction, temporarily reminded this faction of Republicans of Trump’s unfitness for the job. But like the left’s subconscious, the Republican establishment’s selective memory is a powerful force. And as the difficulty of preventing Trump from regaining the nomination has become apparent, many Republican elites have consoled themselves by remembering the years when they felt like they were running the Trump presidency — as opposed to the postelection months and the January day when they were definitely not.

Then, finally, you have the Trump nostalgia of swing voters, which is a simpler matter to explain. Chait focuses on the unreasonable-seeming economic pessimism of some Americans, the weird tensions and contradictions inside the current mood of doom and gloom. But while it’s fair to argue that there’s too much economic doomerism, there’s still a good case (as I’ve   argued   here before) that a general median-voter preference for the pre-Covid Trump economy over the Biden economy is entirely rational — pending a 2024 of low inflation and rapid economic growth, at least. Nor is it necessarily surprising that voters would give Trump more of a pass for the economic crisis created by the shock of the pandemic’s arrival than they give Biden for the state of the economy four years later — especially since the Trump administration’s initial economic response to Covid was arguably quite effective at   propping up incomes   and   righting the stock market .

Meanwhile, there’s more to the national mood than G.D.P. alone. Trump ran for president in 2016 promising not just a blue-collar   economic boom   but also a new amoral, hard-edge approach to the American national interest overseas and a crackdown on illegal immigration. Once in office, Trump never fully controlled his own foreign policy, and his bigotry and the special cruelty of the child-separation policy made his immigration policy unpopular. But on both fronts the overall results (including during the pandemic itself) still look preferable to what’s followed under Biden: A border that seemed relatively secure under Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy is now an ongoing disaster area; a Pax Americana that seemed strained but relatively resilient four years ago is now facing a direct military challenge or a serious threat almost everywhere you look.

To be clear, I don’t think that Biden is at fault for all these trends (though he does bear some responsibility!), or that bringing Trump back would magically whip inflation (his stated policies would not) or cause peace to break out around the world. Just as you can’t step in the same river twice, you can’t rerun a presidential term, especially one that existed in the very different prepandemic world. Instead, a second Trump term would be an undiscovered country, in which anyone nostalgic for either his first term’s conventional Republican policies or its left-empowering cultural atmosphere might be bitterly, disastrously disappointed.

But when Chait writes “whatever his shortcomings, Biden has delivered normalcy,” it’s important to recognize that any recovered normalcy is in the presidency and in Washington, D.C., not in the world at large. The economy is better than it was a year ago, but it is still decidedly not normal in the low-inflation, low-interest-rate sense that Americans took for granted for years. The border situation definitely isn’t normal; the weight of migration on even blue cities is abnormal in the extreme. And in an increasingly war-torn world, a post-Cold War order that remained mostly intact under Trump seems to be dissolving, not stabilizing, now that the supposed adults are back in charge.

None of this makes it impossible for Biden and the Democrats to make the case against restoring a man to the Oval Office who is currently   ranting   on Truth Social about how chief executives deserve unlimited immunity. They just need to recognize that their political problems are a bit more basic than the exhaustion and pessimism, even soul-sickness, that Chait identifies and highlights.

Far be it from me to dismiss the pull of malaise, ennui, decadence. But before it tackles spiritual despair, the Biden White House needs to recognize that the more fundamental question in a democracy — Have your policies delivered prosperity, stability and peace? — is cutting more strongly in Trump’s favor than it’s comfortable for liberals to admit.