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Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on Progressive Politics, News, Culture, Economics and Democracy

SOLVED! #12 - Back to the…1980s? The Power of Nostalgia and Trump’s Reaganitis

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on Progressive Politics, News, Culture, Economics and Democracy

Jay Tomlinson

Marx, Political, Feminism, Jacobin, Left, Hightower, Politics, Counterspin, News, News Commentary, Maddow, Hartmann, Democracynow, Antiracism, Marxism, Socialism, Capitalism, Ezra, Liberal, Intercepted, Hayes, Progressive, Intercept, Intersectionality, Wolff

4.63.4K Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Air Date: 6–23-25

Today, Jay!, Amanda, Deon, and Erin discuss:

  • The long history of nostalgia in politics as we find ourselves reliving the 1980s
  • How MAGA Youth have a lot in common with Reagan Youth (a la Alex P. Keaton) without the context
  • Trump’s Reaganitis: All the ways Trump is just straight up copying Reagan and how he could fail like him too
  • The “Landlord in Chief” and how to fight back against the new feudalism

 

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REFERENCES:

Donald Trump and the ’80s Aesthetic - Jacobin

The 1980s Are Back, and Not in a Good Way - The New York Times

Trump’s Big Fail: Making America the 1980s Again - Mother Jones

Trump is What Happens When You Give a Landlord Power - Current Affairs

 

EXTRAS:

“Wrestling is Drag” - Smartypants Dropout.tv

https://youtube.com/shorts/zw9bNgKogUI

 

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Produced by:

Jay! Tomlinson

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast, although today we're sharing a sample of this week's episode of our other show, solved.

0:11.9

Best of Left members get solved early, ad-free, and complete with a members-only backstage segment all via podcast.

0:19.7

But we're also putting the show out on the Best

0:22.0

of Left YouTube channel where we're attempting to find a new audience. Consider supporting us

0:26.6

directly by signing up for a membership or help us grow on YouTube by subscribing to the

0:31.3

Best of Left YouTube channel and catching every episode of Solved there. And now here's a few minutes

0:37.0

for free to wet your appetite, but just like Best of the Left,

0:40.4

the real benefits kick in when you hear the whole show, which is greater than the sum of

0:44.9

its parts.

0:46.5

Now, for today, you know, I would say that these days, it may feel like we're living in the

0:52.8

world of Back to the Future Part 2, where the dumbest, meanest person any of us knows, basically the real world version of Biff Tannen, has used deceitful means to make himself rich and powerful, only to turn the world into, as Wikipedia describes the plot summary of Back to the Future Part 2, a chaotic

1:13.1

dystopia. And that feels extremely accurate. But Back to the Future isn't the only parallel.

1:21.5

And I'm not even talking about the news, including a lot of talk about wars involving Iran and

1:27.3

Israel. It turns out the more you

1:30.1

understand about the 80s, the more you will understand about today. And so we are beginning

1:36.2

our sojourn to the 80s with the article Donald Trump and the 80s aesthetic written in

1:42.9

Jacobin. And to me, the title basically encaps written in Jacobin.

1:51.1

And to me, the title basically encapsulates everything about why I'm happy to forget the 80s personally. If Trump represents the 80s, and he always has, and Trump seems disgusting to me as a human and everything he represents. And he always has. I mean, I was

2:02.5

a little bit conscious in the 80s. I'm happy to forget all of that. But the article starts with

2:10.3

a description of Hulk Hogan ripping his shirt off at the RNC as a way of calling back to the

2:17.1

glory of the 80s for both Trump and

2:19.9

the Hulk himself. And all I could think about was how I already thought that Hulk Hogan

...

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