When Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea stood onstage at the Republican National Convention and ripped open his shirt, revealing a red Trump/Vance 2024 tank top underneath, he was reenacting a public victory ritual familiar to all Americans of the 1980s. Yes, Hogan was dutifully pledging loyalty to Donald Trump, but he was also reinforcing the aura of his own 1980s brand, linking their lives and careers in a shared retrospective vision of a golden era.

This gesture was only the latest of many similar devotional moments to Trump’s lifelong “success story,” a story that begins in the gilded lobby of his biggest project of the 1980s: Trump Tower. For both Trump and his most slavish supporters, it is permanently 1985. In this shared fantasy, the New York tabloid press is still there, reporting dutifully on Trump’s latest big deal, perhaps leaked to them by “John Barron” or one of Trump’s other confidential press aliases. The paparazzi and syndicated entertainment shows are capturing his image every night as he struts about the town: his press notices and red-carpet interviews forever re-playable on videocassette. Today, Trump’s supporters use the cathode ray patina of 1980s broadcast television and VHS blur to enshrine a golden era of the past, a mystified and near-holy age to which they want to return: the America of the 1980s.

It’s this era which still divides the country. In a December 2023 New York Times Siena poll, 51 percent of those sixty-five or older (the boomers) said they’d vote for Joe Biden; an identical 51 percent of the forty-five to sixty-four age group (Gen X) stated a preference for Trump. In that same poll, Trump edged out Biden 49 to 43 percent among eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds (the Zoomers). It’s easy to see why Generation X might look to the era of their childhood and adolescence with nostalgic glee. Trump was, after all, the self-promoting media superstar par excellence of their youth. But for these younger voters, the Ronald Reagan decade is something else altogether. It’s an ideal past just out of reach, but one they hope to resurrect in the person of a man who was not just personally there but also embodies the era.

This tendency toward nostalgia for a lost past has been observed in Western societies for millennia, especially when said society is undergoing radical change. In the eighth century BC, Hesiod conceived of a legendary golden age just as Greek colonies multiplied across the Eastern Mediterranean. In the turbulent final days of the Republic, Virgil yearned for a prelapsarian Georgic era just as the Roman Empire began to rise. Even the Renaissance itself looked back to the entire classical era to define its ideas of beauty, truth, and justice thanks to the dark legacy of the Black Death and the incipient era of colonialism. This kind of nostalgic yearning expresses a desire to return to simpler times as long-held economic, political, and social orthodoxies find themselves under assault.

Artist and scholar Svetlana Boym’s 2001 work The Future of Nostalgia examines this reactionary impulse toward looking back through the “pain” of nostalgia. Nostalgia was first defined as a disease of soldiers serving far from their native lands during the early modern period, Boym notes. It’s an expressly medicalized diagnosis of longing and pain, often triggered by music from a soldier’s homeland — from the Greek words nóstos, meaning “homecoming,” and álgos, meaning “pain.” There is a promise of “coming home,” but the realization that this past place and time can never truly be reached creates a painful cognitive dissonance. Boym further defines this dichotomy by positing two kinds of nostalgia: a “restorative” version that seeks to recreate the nóstos of an idealized past, banishing the pain over progress and change, and a “reflective” variety that revels in the álgos, in the imperfections and patina granted by time, that recognizes the flaws in our collective conception of the past and plays with those flaws.

And indeed, some modicum of the playfulness of reflective nostalgia is evident in so-called fashwave memes, where the aura and granularity of earlier aesthetics of media are falteringly recreated on the smooth, glitchless medium of the Internet: the visual shorthand of the low visual fidelity on VHS cassettes, the scanlines from old CRT TVs, the neon-limned grid that connoted “high-tech” in 1980s art and advertising, the eerie pulsing of music impassively made by synthesizers. While it may hurt hauntologists such as myself to admit that a certain degree of playfulness is at the center of the fashwave aesthetic, the real ideological meat of restorative nostalgia is just beneath the manufactured patina and surface-level irony. As Boym puts it, “Restorative nostalgia knows two main narrative plots — the restoration of origins and the conspiracy theory.”

A plain return to the modes of social organization of the past, with Trump as ur-patriarch, juxtaposes with and mutually supports these fashwave signifiers: Roman statuary supporting the concept of imperial power, of the “lone man of history” alongside the glossy capitalist promise of the orderly neon grid of cyberspace. As for the primacy of “conspiracy theory” among restorative nostalgics, the longing for a conservative patriarchal past of the 1980s definitely seems to have found its all-powerful conspiratorial enemy in “political correctness,” “wokeness,” “cultural Marxism,” and a dozen other ways of observing that white patriarchal traditionalism has since lost some miniscule part of its still-dominant cultural power and appeal . . . let alone the post-election fusion of MAGA with the QAnon conspiratorial complex. Something must explain why the go-go ’80s ended, after all: why all those good times are now gone and need to be reborn.

Restorative nostalgia has been part of conservative American politics for as long as there’s been a mass media to exploit the public’s hunger for it. The ’80s themselves were a locus of nostalgic feeling about an earlier, simpler America, used to perfection by Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1984. The “Morning in America” advertisement featured soft-focus, slow-dissolved images of suburbia, heralding Reagan putting newly married couples into home ownership. This revivalist theme in Reagan’s campaign served to powerfully motivate his voter base, many of whom were either old enough to remember the postwar years or at the very least the nostalgia for the suburban white 1950s that had been rampant just a decade prior in media like American Graffiti (1973) and Happy Days (1974–84) and continued into the ’80s thanks to time-travel wish-fulfillment fantasias like the box office smash Back to the Future (1985) and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986).

Urban middle-class white baby boomers famously became “yuppies” in the 1980s: propertied members of the bourgeoisie whose momentary dalliance with counterculture in the late ’60s and ’70s had now cooled into an ironic pose subsumed by material success and a studious avoidance of politics. It’s interesting to consider that “Morning in America” itself, the commonly used metonym for Reagan’s “Prouder, Stronger, Better” ad, elides one crucial word from the original script: the narrator intones that “it’s morning again in America,” accentuating the same restoratively nostalgic adverb that is such a vital part of MAGA ideology.

But the material aspect of the appeal of the Reagan era of deregulation and “greed is good” can’t be underestimated, and it’s a key reason why Trump consciously uses the 1980s in his rally speeches, and why Trump’s followers — even the young ones — frequently idealize the period despite the ’80s being the origin point for their own material immiseration. This was the era of Trump’s own greatest material success, after all, and the MAGA crowd’s libidinal identification with Trump’s wealth invariably puts them in mind of a period where their material lives were (perceived as) better.

The hollowing-out of domestic production at the center of neoliberalism was well underway in the 1980s of course; the think pieces about manufacturing decline in the working-class suburbs were already thick on the ground in the Reagan years. Meanwhile, Trump, the ultimate urbanite, was building a real estate empire that often acted to conceal the hollowness at the center of his wealth. Trump’s early career is a perfect encapsulation of the classic individualistic paradox and tension at the heart of class mystification and false consciousness in American society: the lone heroic capitalist who becomes a template and inspiration for “personal financial success,” all as he methodically exploits the working class.

Trump made it big thanks to the material wealth his father, Fred Trump, had appropriated through exploitative, racially discriminatory slumlord practices. Trump took it upon himself to bring this “urban renewal” mindset out of the outer boroughs and into Manhattan. His projects in the late 1970s and early 1980s were quite often teardowns of older, historic skyscrapers. Trump’s destruction of the Bonwit Teller Building’s treasured Art Deco facade to put up Trump Tower is a potent example of Trump remaking Manhattan in his own image. This carving up of the public landscape, the canny exploitation of the last remnants of postwar legalistic liberalism in the form of landlordism made sure, in Boym’s words on the 1980s restoration of the Sistine Chapel, that “historical time would no longer threaten the image of sacred creation.” Like God touching Adam, everything the Don touched came to life, turned to gold.

The aesthetic and the material synergize most acutely in Trump’s propensity for this kind of self-promotion and spectacle. These real estate projects played out on the biggest canvas possible in the 1980s — the New York City media market — and Trump’s reputation as a nouveau arriviste in America’s center of Old Money gave him a leg up among his earliest cult-of-personality fanbase: working-class white ethnics of the five boroughs and tri-state area. This self-identification of the plucky, crude underdog thumbing his nose at convention was and is still crucial to Trump’s appeal.

In ’80s pop culture, the (perceived) underdog was king, whether we’re talking “slob” comedies like Caddyshack (1980) or Ghostbusters (1984), where the heroes are crude, easygoing, hedonistic strivers who thumb their noses at the stuffy establishment; teen sports dramas like The Karate Kid (1984); or Cold War parables like Rocky IV (1985). And Trump took that outsider underdog narrative very seriously, especially when after being blocked from joining the elite fraternity of National Football League franchise owners, he decided to back the upstart United States Football League (USFL) and drove the league into a disastrous set of business decisions that culminated in the USFL’s failure in 1986.

Trump’s failed projects from the 1980s make the connection between capitalist acquisition, consolidation, and media spectacle explicit. His “Television City” proposal in 1984 promised to put high-class apartment complexes cheek by jowl with media production facilities and luxury brand retail establishments in a railyard on the Upper West Side, but his monstrous ego and appetite finally found defeat at the hands of New York politicians, celebrities, and business figures who opposed the plan.

Trump would go on to brand hotel-casinos in Atlantic City, publish an aspirational (and ghostwritten) memoir, release a board game, and increase his number of commercial and media appearances, all intended merely to keep his face and brand in the public eye. As the ’80s passed away and many of Trump’s businesses declared bankruptcy in the early 1990s, Trump’s brand, his relentless self-promotion, and his inchoate aura of past success was all that was left. Trump’s hosting of The Apprentice in the 2000s was the stepping stone between this period and his political ascendency. On The Apprentice, Trump became a creature of pure image, the ultimate boss-as-unleashed-id, leveling a “You’re fired” across a boardroom table in a mimetic display of his former material power.

And I believe that it’s this tattered aura that explains the appeal Trump holds for many reactionary Zoomers. A Trump-curiousness makes much more sense among this post-millennial demographic; they see the kind of unitary, solitary, “man-against-the-world” success of ’80s Trump and witness a mode of capitalist acquisition that seems to have gone by the boards. Just as the Greeks, Romans, and early modern Europeans clung to their conception of a golden age during social upheaval, the Trump Zoomer sees today as a “degenerate” age and the ’80s as a time when men were men, tycoons shoved aside the weak to take what they want, when the spectacle was monocultural rather than fractured, mediated through a press and media machine that single-mindedly served one man’s ego. The ’80s are very much a foreign time and place to these Zoomers, yet faintly reachable because of Trump’s copious contemporary media record.

Even though Boym was writing near the beginning of the internet revolution, she perfectly expressed the emptiness at the core of nostalgic longing mediated online: “Computer memory is independent of affect and the vicissitudes of time, politics, and history; it has no patina of history, and everything has the same digital texture.” Whatever the authenticity lent to Trump’s golden era by the gulf of time and history, this lost past — exemplified by Trump’s shockingly emotionally vulnerable statement two weeks after his COVID bout in 2020: “I’d love to . . . just drive the hell outta here . . . I had such a good life. My life was great” — is flattened into mere ressentiment, the basic engine for the MAGA movement: a personal nóstos enfolded in a reactionary politics of individualistic material success that prove frustratingly elusive for MAGA of all ages to recreate.