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…
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Auteur: Michael Grasso
