IS TRUMP NOSTALGIC FOR EVERYTHING ABOUT HIS YOUTH, EVEN THE CRIME?

The federal government will spends billions of tax dollars on President Trump's orders so the U.S. Navy can live in the past:

President Trump has directed the Navy to tear out a complex system for launching jet fighters from its aircraft carriers and instead go back to using steam catapults, a move Navy officials have fought for years and will likely cost billions of dollars.

U.S. officials say Trump signed a national security memorandum Thursday directing the change, which would involve removing the electromagnetic catapult system used by the ships in the Gerald R. Ford class of carriers.

One of fascism's most effective tactics is making the populace nostalgic for a lost nation that never really existed, or at least wasn't the utopia it's portrayed as. Trump is good at invoking this kind of nostalgia, but in moments like this it becomes clear that he doesn't just express yearnings for real or imagined aspects of the past that matter to (some) Americans -- bygone race and gender relations, economics, and so on. Trump seems to express nostalgia for everything from the past, even things most Americans don't care about (or would actually prefer to be modern).

The story of the catapults goes like this:

Nearly a decade ago, he claims he spoke to a sailor who had positive things to say about steam catapults, and soon after, he told Time magazine that he directed the Navy to re-embrace “goddamn steam.”

From the transcript of that 2017 interview:

You know the catapult is quite important. So I said what is this? Sir, this is our digital catapult system. He said well, we’re going to this because we wanted to keep up with modern [technology]. I said you don’t use steam anymore for catapult? No sir. I said, “Ah, how is it working?” “Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air.”

It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said–and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said what system are you going to be–”Sir, we’re staying with digital.” I said no you’re not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.

Trump is very stupid, so he liked the idea that the current catapults are needlessly complex: I'm not a moron. I'm smart! This technology is too damn complex! But the newer technology is actually better, in many ways:

Replacing the electromagnetic catapults with steam will be a complex endeavor that will likely cost billions of dollars, according to Bryan Clark, a naval expert with the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank....

“Electric is more reliable,” Clark said. “If I can turn these components to be electric instead of steam, it eliminates all the steam related mechanical parts.”

The maintenance on the electrical systems is cheaper, he added. There are 500 fewer sailors on the Ford, in part because fewer technicians are needed to work on the ship’s existing steam equipment.

Do even the Trump followers who take the phrase "Make America great again" very literally want our military to go backwards technologically? I doubt it. But Trump is compulsively nostalgic.

All his favorite songs are decades old. He keeps trying to memify the notion that America is now "the hottest country," a phrase that sounds like sloganeering from the Mad Men era.

And I believe he's even nolstalgic for some problematic things about the past, or at least for the self-righteous backlash to those problems. I think when Trump talks about cities today, he's not talking about any currently existing cities -- he's talking about the cities of his youth, and he's describing them the way critics described them then.

You may have seen this clip earlier this month:

Trump: "Look at the blue cities. What do they have in common? They're all dirty. They're filthy dirty. Their streets are dirty. Their streets smell. Their storefronts are broken. Their trees are all gross. Everything about the place is dirty. It's really all of them."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 3, 2026 at 2:28 PM

Trump had been asked about the war in Iran. He wandered off the subject and said:

I said it the other day that maybe doesn't sound that important, but when a country goes bad, like, look at the blue cities. What do they have in common, aside from massive crime? Much more crime. The Republicans have very little crime. But what do the blue cities have in mind? And also, you can say this with nations, when they go bad. The blue cities have something in common -- crime, high crime, vicious, violent crime -- but what do they have in common? They're all dirty. They're filthy dirty. Their streets are dirty. Their streets smell. Their storefronts are broken. Their trees are all gross. Everything about the place is dirty. And I don't want to mention any specific city. It's really all of them. But you go into these cities that are blue, they're crime-ridden and they're filthy, dirty. They're like Washington, D.C., was a year and a half ago, with graffiti all over the place, with crime all over the place, with people afraid to be here.

(I added the end of that final sentence from this transcript.)

How would Trump know this? As far as I know, Trump hasn't walked a block in any American city this century. He's a guy who goes from the building lobby to the limo to the building lobby. His windows are always tinted. He's not describing anything he's seen with his own eyes. He's describing cities the way they were portrayed on the news in 1973 and 1982, and the way they were portrayed in twentieth-century movies like Dirty Harry and Death Wish.

And look at the way he described the city of Washington a year ago, when he announced the deployment of National Guard troops there:

In declaring a “crime emergency” in Washington, Trump wrongly claimed at an Aug. 11 press conference, “Murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever. They say 25 years, but they don’t know what that means because it just goes back 25 years.”

... The city’s murder rate did increase in 2023 to the highest rate in 20 years, but it wasn’t the highest ever.

Nope:

And murders have decreased since.

Statistics released by the Metropolitan Police Department on the same day as Trump’s remarks showed the number of homicides had decreased by 32% from 2023 to 2024 and by 12% so far from 2024 to 2025. In addition, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia reported in January that violent crime overall for 2024 was down 35% from the previous year and was “the lowest it has been in over 30 years.”

As the one-year anniversary of Trump's deployment approached earlier this month, Trump said of D.C., “This was the crime capital, frankly, of the world.”

That was D.C.'s reputation decades ago. Crime has dropped since then. But Trump doesn't know that. He's tapping into memories of the D.C. he saw on TV back in the late twentieth century.

A year ago, he said, "We're getting rid of the slums, too" -- evoking a bygone era when one of the goals of "urban renewal" was "slum clearance."

Trump has a first-hand familiarity with the places he's lived in and the places he's played golf -- the White House, Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster, Trump Tower. Everything else he knows mostly from television -- old television. He lives in the past.