Galloping backwards in Trump's America
In countless ways, the president wants to return us to earlier times. What do you suppose he is afraid of?
Part of Donald Trump’s power comes from his similarity to a religious cult. (Unsplash photo by Chris Chow)
Behind a house that used to be ours in the Mohawk Valley stands a great black walnut tree, its arms sweeping out to shade an expanse of the yard. It’s there today because we didn’t take up the offer of an Amish guy who appeared at our door one day a few years back wanting to buy the tree. He would have hauled it out by horses and turned it into furniture.
He had stepped out of a minivan in our driveway, which seemed a bit incongruous since Amish aren’t allowed to drive. But they often hire drivers from among the “English,” as they call all of us outside their faith. He was bearded, and wore the usual Amish male attire: suspenders over a button-down shirt, trousers with buttons rather than a modern zipper and a wide-brimmed hat. I politely told him that we cherished the tree, in fact, and didn’t want to give it up. He climbed back into the van and was driven away.
The Amish still farm with horses, not tractors, and because they don’t use electricity from power lines, they have no telephones, televisions, refrigerators, medical devices or computers. It may be picturesque and quaint, but the 19th-century lifestyle they follow is hard, leaving younger generations with few choices.
In fact, the reality of Amish life is what you would expect of a cult: people are indoctrinated into beliefs and raised in a closed society, their education tightly controlled and interactions with people unlike themselves quite limited, making life outside the community almost impossible to imagine. There’s a veneer of comfort in the old ways when progress is seen as threatening and modernity is defined as sinful.
Lately I’ve been wondering about what makes some people turn away from today’s reality and tomorrow’s opportunity, clinging to a past that is neither convenient nor hopeful. And the Amish keep coming to mind in the context of the many ways that Donald Trump’s administration is intentionally backpedaling from progress. There’s a similarity, I’d say, between the religious zealots who use horses to haul hay wagons and the hard-right radicals who are returning America to Gilded Age economics and Industrial Era technology.
The Amish, though, don’t try to impose their belief and lifestyle on the rest of us. The MAGA Men of Washington — the leaders are all men, you know, with women in distinctly supporting roles, just like the Amish — are determined to press their retrogressive vision on the nation and the world, taking us all back to a place that imperils not just the nation’s advancement, but the world’s safety.
I’ve concluded that they’re similarly motivated: by fear, ignorance and cultural habits. But while I feel some sympathy for the Amish — simple people who have been isolated by their religious faith — there’s no excuse for a political movement that seems to have lost track of history. A lot of what the Cult of Trump is pushing is policy and action tried in the past and then wisely abandoned as the nation embraced new realities and challenges. We’re retreating in an advancing world.
But America needs to find the courage to face the future again.
This week’s announcements of tariffs on U.S. trading partners, for example, are returning the world’s economy to the dynamics last in place during the Great Depression. It’s not coincidental that countless societies have advanced dramatically since then, as the smothering effects of high tariffs were replaced by free trade.
Here’s some history: Tariffs took hold during the years after America’s Civil War, the so-called Gilded Age, until the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 raised tariffs to record levels. That invited retaliatory tariffs that exacerbated international tensions and deepened the Depression. The disastrous effect was broadly realized in the immediate aftermath of World War II, so the U.S. played a leading role in establishing a global rules-based trading system. It was driven by the notion that trade can foster economic growth and strengthen international relations. After all, you’re less likely to go to war with nations whose economies are interdependent with yours.
Aside from the strategic value of trade in forging friendships, there’s also a humanitarian element, though that seems unlikely to be an important issue for a true Trump acolyte. That is, American dollars have raised the standard of living in countries that have manufactured and exported goods for our market. While concern about that is alien to the “America First” slogan of Trumpism, it ought to concern even MAGA types that poverty is destabilizing, raising the risk of war and economic chaos. Our investments, by contrast, can help strengthen other economies.
These latest Trumpian moves to return America to some bad old days in world economics aren’t isolated, though. Throughout official Washington, leaders are winning favor with the boss by undoing the progress of at least a half-century in many ways:
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this week pulled back almost $500 million in contracts for development of mRNA vaccines, weeks after revoking a nearly $600 million contract to develop a vaccine for bird flu. First developed to treat Covid-19, mRNA technology won a Nobel Prize in 2023 and is widely considered by scientists to be the best option for protecting people in another pandemic. But Kennedy is a vaccine skeptic, and he favors instead an approach to vaccinations that is more than a century old. Without the mRNA technology, one expert told The New York Times, “we would have had millions of more Covid deaths.”1
At the Environmental Protection Agency, officials are working to revoke the agency’s authority to combat climate change, by rescinding a finding from 16 years ago that planet-warming greenhouse gases put human health at risk. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin brags that this would be “the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States,” making it all but impossible for the government to rein in life-threatening pollution from burning coal, oil and gas. People have used coal for centuries, of course, but it was the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries that spurred widespread coal use, releasing large amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere, contributing to dirtier air and water, acid rain and deforestation. For decades, Americans have believed that the era of dirty coal was behind us, until the Trump administration began to again peddle the myth that there exists something called “clean coal.”2
In killing the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Trump administration has cut foreign assistance from an average of $51 billion a year to $13 billion. Research suggests this could lead to millions of deaths through such illnesses as cholera, especially among children. A study published Lancet, a medical journal, estimated that USAID saved over 90 million lives over the past two decades while projecting American “soft power” worldwide. The U.S. retrenchment from such humanitarian work returns the world to a time when nations’ influence derived from their military might alone.3
The United States has recently withdrawn from a number of international organizations, which some see as a return to the isolationism that persisted in American foreign policy until Pearl Harbor – with disastrous consequences, for example, for European Jews. Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the U.N. Human Rights Council, as well as international climate agreements. At the same time, the administration’s hostility to nations that have historically been the nation’s best friends – including those in Western Europe, as well as Canada – have begun to undermine international cooperation and the effectiveness of global institutions aimed at curbing totalitarian states and hostile players. Trump is downgrading U.S. engagement with the UN, which was established after World War II so that there would be a forum – however limited in its effectiveness – to redress grievances among nations without the armed conflict that had raged worldwide for centuries. This week he responded to a casual anti-American comment by a Russian official by moving two nuclear-armed submarines closer to Russian waters, a provocative move reminiscent of the Cold War gamesmanship of the 1960s.4
There are many more examples, all leading to the conclusion that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” might refer not only to the 1950s of the 79-year-old president’s childhood ,but also to the mid-19th-century world order into which his grandparents were born, in Germany and Scotland.
It makes you wonder how it is that someone with all the comforts provided by great wealth would feel so uncomfortable in today’s world, which is key to understanding why people try to cling to an earlier time. Is Donald Trump a Luddite? A reactionary? Really, it hardly matters why his administration is trying to take us backwards, because the challenge now is to adopt strategies that can convince Americans that we cannot let ourselves settle into an uncomfortable and dangerous march into the past.
Humans have certain cognitive biases that hold us to the past, experts say. To cite two: There’s a status quo bias, since we tend to feel comfortable with what’s known, and a negativity bias, which causes us to focus on threats and the potential for failure when encountering something new.5
More practical factors also inhibit comfort with change, including lack of awareness and understanding. People fed a news diet of fear and unrest, or deprived of honest information about the world around them, tend to be change-resistant. For example: 64 percent of Americans believe that crime increased across the country in 2024, though crime fell last year across every category and population group, with both violent crime and property crime at the lowest level since the 1960s. No wonder Trump’s threat to deploy National Guard troops to fight crime in Washington, D.C., has some resonance, even though crime is at a 30-year low in the nation’s capital. People are simply misled, and the president is happy to accommodate and even encourage their misunderstanding.6
But today’s march backward is also a result of the shift of the Republican party from an ideological or issue-based alliance to a personality cult loyal to Donald Trump. Researchers in the Netherlands recently published a paper likening Trump’s hold on his supporters to medieval carnivals, where people celebrated outrageous behavior by charismatic figures. “Trump’s charismatic authority and cult-like following strongly aligns with the concept of the transgressive carnival fool,” professors Elizaveta Gaufman and Adrian Favera wrote for the European Consortium for Political Research. That transgressive behavior is part of why he has such a hold on his followers, which he uses to lead them backward.7
No wonder, then: If behavior akin to medieval times attaches the loyalty of people already uneasy about change and misdirected about what’s real, it’s understandable that policies that are throwbacks to an earlier era draw support.
Yet there are reasons to hope that the regression will be short-lived. It arises simply in considering human nature and the relentlessness of change.
Over time, history has been marked by a prevailing upward trend, despite frequent setbacks: Science and technology have continued to progress, and economic advances have continued. Humans overall are wealthier, healthier and more secure than ever before. Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel laureate economist from MIT, argued recently that “human nature is more adaptable than most people think.”8
Human evolution over the past millennia, after all, has been marked by increases in human liberty and advances in security that have allowed societies to become more cooperative, nonviolent and progressive. That progress hinges on individuals making choices for themselves that speak to the dauntless human spirit, with a goal of achievement over failure. In the end, progress is a powerful human aspiration.
After all, efforts to turn back progress typically don’t go well. The ruler of Mecca in 1511 was so concerned that conversations over coffee, a newly popular beverage, might encourage dissent against his rule that he issued an edict banning coffee consumption. It didn’t last long: people insisted on their coffee, and popular coffee houses reopened, known as qahveh kanes, or “schools the wise.”
There will always be those who cling to the past, and we’re unluckily now in the clutches of a leader who wants to take us there. But we can’t let him take down what we cherish. And here’s the good news: There are plenty of us outside the cult.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/health/rfk-jr-vaccine-funding.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/climate/epa-endangerment-finding-repeal-proposal.html
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1-5452513/trump-usaid-foreign-aid-deaths
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-journal-of-international-law/article/president-trump-begins-second-term-by-withdrawing-the-united-states-from-international-agreements-and-institutions-and-contravening-us-international-legal-obligations/31706905568737ED82A44E3FFFE48D7D
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cutting-edge-leadership/202408/why-are-people-so-resistant-to-change
popularinformation@substck.com
https://theloop.ecpr.eu/explaining-the-trump-loyalty-cult-phenomenon/
https://impact.economist.com/new-globalisation/a-choice-of-the-future
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