When Trump's Brain Broke

Sometime Around 1989

As I’m sure you’re all very tired of being reminded, the title of my book, which covers the period roughly between 1989 and 1993, is When the Clock Broke. It’s a reference to a speech by one of the principal figures in the narrative, Murray Rothbard, but I thought it also captured the uncanny sense that, as a country, we seem stuck dealing with many of the same issues that arose in that brief era. It also gestured at Francis Fukuyama’s famous End of History thesis, but suggested a mechanical breakdown of history instead of a triumphant denouement.

I thought micro-era showed the first cracks of the neoliberal order: inequality, deindustrialization, fragmentation of the public sphere, anxiety over immigration, trade, and America’s place in the world, etc. It was all there. I believed there were deep structural reasons for why it seemed to echo across our time. My thesis was that this moment witnessed the first signs of a legitimacy crisis in our institutions that has fully crystallized in the past decade or so. But recently I’ve been thinking that the reason why the late 80s and 90s feel like a period we can’t quite move past is that Trump himself is stuck there.

If you look at all his impulses and instincts, you can trace them back to this particular period, which happens to be right before he went bankrupt and got divorced. Leon Trotsky once developed the concept of “uneven and combined development” to explain how capitalism matures in different places and how features of an advanced economy can exist alongside retrograde technology, institutions, and practices. I wonder if we shouldn’t also think about the uneven and combined development of Trump’s brain.

Consider: Trump recently referred to St. Petersburg as Leningrad, a name that the city has not borne for over 30 years. Some suspect his tendency to lavish praise and respect on Putin is because he’s a Kremlin asset, but I think, on some level, he believes he’s still dealing with the Soviet Union. Russia is a “big power,” as he puts it. The pageantry of the recent meeting with the Russian leader comes straight out of the late Cold War summits of Reagan and H.W. Bush. Not for nothing does the late Cold War align precisely with when Trump was at his first peak. In 1987, he even met General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev^.

Then there’s trade. Trump is obsessed with tariffs. When did this preoccupation publicly emerge? Well, in the late 1980s. In 1987, he took out a full-page ad in the Times, complaining that, “For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.” The open letter is primarily focused on the supposedly unfair trading practices of the Japanese, who are said to be “ripping off” America and must be “made to pay.” At the time, this was not an unusual opinion. There were dozens of books and articles that portrayed Japan as a rising economic power that threatened to overtake the United States. Politicians from Paul Tsongas to Pat Buchanan used Japan-bashing as part of their appeals to the public. Trump was just parroting a line that was part of the common sense of that era, along with gripes about South Korea and West Germany, as well. Of course, that all seems a little silly now since Japan’s bubble economy burst, and it has stagnated ever since. But Trump’s attitude to foreign trade seems to have been forged in that period of anxiety over American decline.

Trump has directed federal forces into America’s cities, citing rampant and uncontrolled crime. This is a political pretext, but again, he seems to think it’s the late 80s or early 90s when violent crime really was out of control. In 1990, murders peaked in New York at 2,245. The idea of using troops to combat crime was also kind of a cable TV commonplace of that era. In 1989, Ross Perot demanded that the country, “[D]eclare civil war and the drug dealer is the enemy," he says. "There ain't no bail. . . . [Drug dealers] go to POW camp. You can start to deal with the problem in straight military terms. We can apply the rules of war." That same year, Trump published his infamous open letter about the Central Park Jogger Case, calling for a brutal crackdown on lawlessness. And Bush I invoked the Insurrection Act and sent the Marines to Los Angeles in 1992 during the Rodney King riots, but they arrived too late to do much except pose for photo ops. The imagery of the troops “retaking” American cities became the coda of Buchanan’s infamous “Cultural War” speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention.

People often wonder why Gen X in particular is so enamored of Trump. Well, could it be that they evince the same delayed development that always brings them back to their glory days. Trump, like Napoleon once was for France’s peasants, represents a memory of grandeur for America’s petit bourgeoisie. In his novel Cousin Bette, Balzac remarks:

Have you observed how readily, in childhood or at the beginning of our social life, we set up a model for ourselves, spontaneously and often unawares? So a bank clerk dreams, as he enters his manager's drawing-room, of possessing one just like it. If he makes his way, twenty years later it will not be the luxury then in fashion that he will want to display in his house, but the out-of-date luxury that fascinated him long before.

As Trump redecorates the White House in faux rococo style, perhaps something like what Balzac is talking about accounts for the continued public fascination with the dated ’80s glitz and glamor that Trump represents. And it’s back, baby! This new generation seems intent on recapitulating the crass materialism, as well as the casual homophobia, misogyny, and racism of the 1980s.

There’s a word for all of this, of course: “reactionary,” which refers precisely to the desire to reimpose a previous disposition of society after its time has passed. It makes sense why Trump would want to return to the time before he seemed vulnerable at all, before his businesses collapsed, and before his very nasty divorce with Ivana splashed across the tabloids. But being a reactionary requires a moment of self-consciousness, knowing what one wants to bring back. Trump may be trying to reimpose an old order, but he also seems to think it never really passed. For him, history didn’t end; it never existed in the first place.