How Trump Channels the 1970s

President Trump has brought the spirit of the 1970s into the Oval Office. If there is one consistent message that has come out of this White House, it is a message born out of the turbulent decade: Don’t trust any institution.

Every president carries with them the zeitgeist of a period that shaped their values and vision. In recent decades, Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush embodied the patriotism and national bravado of the early Cold War in the 1950s—an unyielding belief in American Exceptionalism. To the consternation of Representative Newt Gingrich, President Bill Clinton emerged as the voice of the 1960s counter-culture even though his domestic policies were often at odds with the legacy of FDR and LBJ. President George W. Bush championed the conservative ethos of Reagan’s America in the 1980s, with its zealous belief in free markets, deregulation, and tax cuts. President Barack Obama promoted the hard-headed, data-loving, problem-solving pragmatic attitude of the 1990s when the end of the Cold War suggested that almost any challenge could be met.

For President Trump, it’s all about the 1970s. That bleak decade