Back to Dystopia: Trump’s Nostalgia is America’s Nightmare

It’s the mid-1980s. Donald Trump is worried about Japan — buying up real estate in New York, selling small, efficient cars in a market dominated by bloated, unreliable, gas-guzzling behemoths from GM and Ford. American manufacturing was already falling apart, and Trump knew it. He just didn’t understand why.

At the same time, Reagan’s policies gutted mental health care in America. Beds disappeared. Facilities closed. People in crisis weren’t helped — they were pushed onto the streets. Homelessness skyrocketed. And yet, no one with power seemed to ask: what did you expect?

That’s the America Donald Trump longs to return to — the "golden age" of crumbling institutions, poisoned rivers, and unchecked corporate rot. The era when he was rich, famous, high-flying, and untouchable. That’s the version of America he’s trying to “fix” by dragging us backward.

Fast-forward to 2025. He’s promising to restore American manufacturing by slapping tariffs on foreign cars and car parts. But here’s the part he still doesn’t get: cars aren’t made in one country anymore. Chips from Taiwan. Drivetrains crossing the U.S., Canada, and Mexico multiple times. By taxing every part at every stop, he’s not protecting American jobs — he’s kneecapping the entire supply chain.

This isn’t policy. It’s cosplay.

Trump remains what he’s always been: incurious, uneducated, and aggressively uninformed. During his first term, he scrapped NAFTA — a flawed but functional trade deal — and replaced it with the USMCA, which he claimed was better (because branding!). And now, here he is again: promising to "fix" what he already “fixed.” It's like rebooting a failed reboot.

And what exactly are we returning to?

A smog-choked skyline? Coal plants and acid rain? Rivers so polluted they literally caught fire? (Friendly reminder: water isn’t supposed to be flammable.)

We lost manufacturing because we gave it away. And no, you can’t flip a switch and bring it back. Those factories are gone. The infrastructure is gone. The workers are gone. We're a service economy now. And a tariff war won’t restart the Industrial Revolution. It will just make everything more expensive, limit choices, and isolate America further from the global economy.

This isn’t greatness. It’s delusion. It’s the last gasp of a man who peaked in the '80s, clinging to his ego like a liferaft. He wants to return to the only time in his life he felt powerful, potent, and relevant — a time when the world still cared what Donald Trump had to say, or so he thought.

But here in 2025, that obsession has real consequences.

A few trailing realities:

• USAID used to fund American farmers to grow crops for famine-stricken countries. That’s now defunded. Crops go unplanted. Farmers go unpaid.
• The money “sent to Ukraine”? That funded American weapons manufacturers, mostly in red states. So when Trump shut that down, he effectively triggered layoffs in his own base.
• As we inch closer to exiting NATO (because Putin said so), our allies stop buying American weapons. Would you buy missiles from a country that might side with your enemy next year?

Trump is burning America down for nostalgia. For vanity. For the memory of when he had more hair, more money, and maybe and erection without needing pills.