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.