https://www.anativeson.org/p/trump-and-nostalgia
Trump and Nostalgia
by Eddie
March 3, 2025
Honestly, it feels, at least to me, like the country is falling apart around us. That feeling isn’t reducible to the chaos of Donald Trump. Today melancholy joins with arrogance. Confusion with fantasy and illusion. Like we are living in the last days of the American empire and nostalgia is our winding sheet.
Like many Americans, I watched the debacle in the Oval Office between President Trump and President Zelenskyy. I watched Trump and J.D. Vance attempt to ambush and humiliate a man who is desperately trying to defend his country. And then I listened to a gaggle of sycophants who celebrated Trump’s behavior and demanded that Zelenskyy apologize. They complained that his dress was inappropriate and disrespectful. That his aggressive response to Vance’s misrepresentation of the war precipitated the outbursts. Scott Jennings of CNN said, “I mean, all Zelenskyy had to do today was put on a tie, show up, smile, say thank you, sign the papers, and have lunch.” Sign the papers? They wanted him to submit to Trump’s extortion and say thank you.
America’s arrogance on full display.
I kept thinking to myself that these people are ridiculous – that they are plastic toys with strings in their backs and arms with kung fu grips. Their view of America is distorted by an adolescent understanding of history or something worse. The United States emerged as a world power amid the ruins of Europe and the beginnings of the decolonization of the so-called third world. That reality no longer exists. The world isn’t beholden only to US power, no matter how powerful this country is, and if these MAGA people believe, as they seem to do, that everyone must submit to them – must pay homage to them – they will soon learn a harsh and difficult lesson. Other countries have interests, too. And, inevitably, ordinary people will be caught in the middle of the violent collisions.
Trump and his minions pine for an idea of American power that echoes the 19th century. Make America Great Again is the slogan of nostalgia, a longing for a past that never was and a yearning for a time when everyone, including the world, knew their place. “Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement,” writes Svetlana Bloom, the late Harvard Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature, “but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.” Trump imagines himself as an emperor or strong man of sorts. Beholden to no one, not even to history, he believes that he can reverse the workings of time, or he sells the idea that he can. But like the Wizard of Oz, behind the glare and scowl, rests a frightened and wounded little man.
Nostalgia works like shooting flares. It blinds us to the faults and failings of those who invoke it and turns our attention, instead, to a past gilded in virtue. Michael Kammen was right. “Nostalgia…is essentially history without guilt.” And without guilt or any sense of shame, these people are poised for unimaginable horrors, and it will be the most vulnerable in the world who must bear the brunt of it all.
Winding sheets, indeed.
by Eddie
March 3, 2025
Honestly, it feels, at least to me, like the country is falling apart around us. That feeling isn’t reducible to the chaos of Donald Trump. Today melancholy joins with arrogance. Confusion with fantasy and illusion. Like we are living in the last days of the American empire and nostalgia is our winding sheet.
Like many Americans, I watched the debacle in the Oval Office between President Trump and President Zelenskyy. I watched Trump and J.D. Vance attempt to ambush and humiliate a man who is desperately trying to defend his country. And then I listened to a gaggle of sycophants who celebrated Trump’s behavior and demanded that Zelenskyy apologize. They complained that his dress was inappropriate and disrespectful. That his aggressive response to Vance’s misrepresentation of the war precipitated the outbursts. Scott Jennings of CNN said, “I mean, all Zelenskyy had to do today was put on a tie, show up, smile, say thank you, sign the papers, and have lunch.” Sign the papers? They wanted him to submit to Trump’s extortion and say thank you.
America’s arrogance on full display.
I kept thinking to myself that these people are ridiculous – that they are plastic toys with strings in their backs and arms with kung fu grips. Their view of America is distorted by an adolescent understanding of history or something worse. The United States emerged as a world power amid the ruins of Europe and the beginnings of the decolonization of the so-called third world. That reality no longer exists. The world isn’t beholden only to US power, no matter how powerful this country is, and if these MAGA people believe, as they seem to do, that everyone must submit to them – must pay homage to them – they will soon learn a harsh and difficult lesson. Other countries have interests, too. And, inevitably, ordinary people will be caught in the middle of the violent collisions.
Trump and his minions pine for an idea of American power that echoes the 19th century. Make America Great Again is the slogan of nostalgia, a longing for a past that never was and a yearning for a time when everyone, including the world, knew their place. “Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement,” writes Svetlana Bloom, the late Harvard Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature, “but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.” Trump imagines himself as an emperor or strong man of sorts. Beholden to no one, not even to history, he believes that he can reverse the workings of time, or he sells the idea that he can. But like the Wizard of Oz, behind the glare and scowl, rests a frightened and wounded little man.
Nostalgia works like shooting flares. It blinds us to the faults and failings of those who invoke it and turns our attention, instead, to a past gilded in virtue. Michael Kammen was right. “Nostalgia…is essentially history without guilt.” And without guilt or any sense of shame, these people are poised for unimaginable horrors, and it will be the most vulnerable in the world who must bear the brunt of it all.
Winding sheets, indeed.
“We can be better people, a better country, if we dare to imagine…”
