Trump Seized the Populist Comfort of Nostalgia to Win

In 1980, I remember celebrating my mother’s birthday just before leaving to go back to college. We watched this segment of Trump and Tom Brokaw when it was new and when Trump was known as a “rich guy” married to an Eastern European Olympic contender. They were part of the New York elite scene, people distant from us but people who frequently appeared in the news or magazines.

NBC: Donald Trump Interviewed by Tom Brokaw on the Today Show — 1980 — Source

At that point, he wasn’t particularly controversial, though many New Yorkers did not like or trust him. He was just a wealthy and arrogant real estate mogul from Queens. As the years went by, he became a vaguely comical character that fit into the cityscape right alongside the glitzy excesses of the 1980s.

There was nothing memorable about him — except he was always around. Most of us can point to an event in our lives when we either first became aware of Trump, when we watched or listened to him prior to his political ambitions.

So having a place already in many of our personal memories, referencing the collective past is even easier — as well as being a well-known political tool that politicians have used for decades.

In 1960, when Richard Nixon challenged John F. Kennedy, his campaign message centered on goals for the future — and he lost. Eight years later, Nixon rose like a phoenix from the ashes with the nostalgic promise to Nixon: “restore respect for America around this world.” He won.

Ronald Regan successfully campaigned on the nostalgic pledge that he would lead the nation to “a rebirth of the American tradition of leadership” and “restore to the federal government the capacity to do the people’s work without dominating their lives.”

The past is the dream and promise of the populist, returning to the idea of rebuilding is a common trope in political speeches, evidenced by the frequency of verbs like “restore” and “renew.” The past is safe for us; it’s a place that doesn’t change. And when we think of the past, for most of us, Donald Trump is part of it.

Trump being part of our recollection during a time of relative economic ease and national safety in the United States combines the two types of nostalgia: the personal and the historical. The personal connects him to our past experiences and the historical can ignite longing for those rose-colored days of yore. It has clearly worked for him in his 2024 re-bid.

People who are nostalgic — meaning, people who long for America’s “good old days” — were more likely to vote for Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections.

A Nation Seeing Societal Change as the “Other”

One of my neighbors, an affable and hard-working man who has lived in New York City all his life, supports Trump and, prior to the election, rather aggressively began asking other people in our building to see his point of view.

Here, I should say I live in a building with a fair number of non-binary folks, a sizable percentage of new Americans, and some dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. John would assail people in the building’s communal areas: the mailbox, the laundry areas, and the storage rooms while wearing his MAGA hat. When I asked him if he thought he would get anywhere with his personal campaign for Trump in our building, he told me he knew which “people to talk to” and smiled.

His spiel? Trump will return America to a place that doesn’t include a burgeoning of migration that they see as a potential threat to both the nation’s economy and peace. John’s t-shirt held Trump’s generic slogan of “America First” and he presented himself as a regular guy, the kind of hard-working, honest guy that made America great in the first place.

And that idea, the notion of putting America first, is a reference that appealed to many. Trump supporters saw his message as a promise to return America to a place that was more independent, where politics seemed simpler, more representative of the common man, and less ruled by the elite. Voters who felt left behind by societal shifts connected with Trump’s message that the country was more stable, more secure, and more of a world power.

Society is evolving, as it always has, as it always will. But with the connectedness the Internet and television afford, there is a visibility in society now that rapidly shows the proliferation of same sex marriages, of the increase of women and minorities in spheres of influence, of the amplification of voices established society could previously ignore. In this sense, for these voters, Trump’s appeals to a past that seemed more “unified” offered a form of comfort in a time of their perceived disarray.

In their recollections of Trump as a convicted felon, as a man who did not respond to the pandemic, as a man who fanned the flames of insurrection, Republican voters grow fuzzy. Instead, they present and perceive him as a man who represents the values of the American worker, as a man who will repair the economy and safeguard our borders from the “animals” who are pouring across it unbridled. He will bring us back to that safe place we call home.

“Among the radical right, nostalgia is often linked to the idea of decadence, that the nation is in decay, mainly due to non-European immigration, and that immediate political action is needed to avoid an impending catastrophe.” ~ Jens Rydgren

The Nostalgic Idea of Home

If you look at the basic message of his campaign, at the MAGA acronym, even that is a promise of renewal to a previous state. Trump will Make America Great Again, bringing us back to a place when we were better, but not questioning what, exactly, has made us not great now.

Glancing at Trump’s campaign website, it offers ideas such as “rebuild the greatest economy in history,” “stop crime and restore safety,” and “renew American strength and leadership” as goals for his new term. His supporters are zealots who fail to look at his misogynistic behavior, his numerous failed businesses, his public mocking of a disabled man, or his continual and well-documented lies. They see him as one of them, as a man who yearns for an America that was functioning without shifting social norms, an America that felt more like the safe space of a remembered home.

And that is the key word of nostalgia: home. It’s the reason populists frequently utilize nostalgia to mobilize supporters: nostalgia is a homecoming, a seeking of refuge that protects the pure, honest, hardworking people who stand united against harmful strangers, and in this case, they are also united against change. Those memories connect us as nostalgia is a social emotion.

The very word is at the heart of the Trump campaign. Nostalgia can be defined as a mix of nostos “heroes returning home” and algia “a painful condition,” which roughly translates to “a hero coming home” and not any hero, but one who has faced tribulations. The failed 2020 campaign and the assassination attempts add to the idea that Trump has faced his share of adversity. And now that hero is having a homecoming.

The idea of home creates a convenient metaphor as well. Populists exploit nostalgia to establish a line between the true “us” and the immoral “them.” The shared social identification allows “us” into the home and slams the door on “them.” The problem with this type of black-and-white identification is how it maligns political opponents and their viewpoints, devolving them from legitimate rivals into the enemy which creates divisiveness and a visceral political animosity.

Trump’s rhetoric is not specifically about what is wrong with the present; rather, he successfully tapped into the collective yearning for an idea of the past, into an American past that ignores the racism, hate, and misogyny that plagued it. It was an emotional and psychological pull so powerful that it contradicted specific policy beliefs, sparked a movement, propelled him to victory in 2016, and has since defined his political persona.

Romanticizing the past is especially common while dealing with worry in the present. We all recall our youth as a time when we were stronger, more powerful, and perhaps more vibrant. We may not pay as much attention to how we were more impulsive, more financially insecure, and far less wise. The negative aspect of nostalgia is that it can cause selective amnesia and fabricate a history that wasn’t exactly as great as we may remember. Memory is subject to blurring its own sharp edges.

Where We Are Now

The Harris/Walz campaign frequently chanted, ““We’re not going back!” meaning we, as a nation, are not going to succumb to the ideas of Project 2025 and surrender basic freedoms. But for many, the slogan evokes the opposite of nostalgia: to some, it meant the continuation of a trajectory that was far too woke and veering into places unknown.

The prevailing narrative is that Harris lost due to a focus on wokeness — the idea that the Democratic Party has shifted too far to the left. But I think their defeat can be understood more by what Bernie Sanders wrote on X, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” He goes on to say, “Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy, which has so much economic power?”

We can only hope that the Democratic Party reflects on what it has come to represent to so many. Their misunderstanding of the populace has cost them — and us — mightily.

Trump is here now; he will be here for the next four years, and he will hold a great deal of power. What the future will bring with a man at the helm who has led a campaign rife with egregiously false claims and unhinged speeches is uncertain. As Jim Small writes, “We have transformed ourselves from the shining city on the hill to a monument to the grotesque, an experimental empire set to be destroyed in a madness of our own making.”

We can only hope that quote is not prescient.