Don’t Buy the Nostalgia Trump Is SellingBeing whimsical about the past is fine. Trump’s weaponized nostalgia isn’t.
Horrible news from Boulder, Colorado, yesterday, where a man wielding a makeshift flamethrower attacked people marching in solidarity with the Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas. The FBI is investigating it as an act of terror. Politico reports:
The attack comes less than two weeks after two Israeli embassy staffers were killed by another shooter at an event in Washington, D.C. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. Antisemitism is a terrible curse. Happy Monday.
The Use and Abuse of Nostalgiaby William Kristol For people of a certain age, and especially those of a conservative disposition, nostalgia comes naturally. So when you see that the New York Knicks—despite an impressively scrappy effort—have once again been eliminated from the NBA playoffs, you don’t gnash your teeth or focus on next year. Instead you think back to the last time the Knicks were NBA champions, 52 years ago (!), in 1973. What a group of players: Willis Reed and Walt Frazier, Dave DeBusschere and Bill Bradley! Earl the Pearl! What a great coach, CCNY’s Red Holzman! And what a march through the playoffs! The upset victory over the hated Boston Celtics in the Eastern Championship Finals, handing the Celtics their first defeat ever in a seventh game at the Boston Garden. And then the 4–1 win in the finals against Wilt Chamberlain’s Lakers. Of course, even the glories of 1973 pale by comparison to those of 1970, and that year’s championship against the Lakers, with Willis Reed famously hobbling onto the court for the Game 7. What a time for a young basketball fan from New York. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!” One could go on. But the point is, memories are a powerful thing. Nostalgia is a powerful thing. In fact, one can be nostalgic for things that happened before one was alive. You read about Churchill and Britain in World War II, you listen to a few BBC reports from the time and to some of Churchill’s speeches, and you feel nostalgia for that era of greatness too, even though you only know it as hearsay and history. You can also be nostalgic about events from the more recent past, when you were already an adult. Reagan’s 1984 speech to the boys of Pointe du Hoc. The magical McCain campaign of 2000—until it was brought down in the mud of South Carolina. Nostalgia of this kind is a normal human phenomenon. It is—I think—a healthy phenomenon. And as a political matter, a nostalgic conservatism is a useful check on the errors of presentism and the temptations of progressivism. But nostalgia has its downside, too. And one can’t help but see that clearly now, in the America of 2025. For one thing, it leads one to forget the dark sides of the past in ways that can mislead one in the present. Then there is the really dangerous kind of nostalgia: a nostalgia that’s been purposefully weaponized. Weaponized nostalgia in the hands of a demagogue and his movement goes beyond obtuseness to past evils, beyond curmudgeonly close-mindedness about the present, even beyond an unpleasant intolerance for the unfamiliar. It becomes a rabid hostility to—even a hatred for—whomever it’s easy to blame for producing this new world around us, a world that seems strange and scary. When demagogues exploit this kind of nostalgia, it can become an ugly thing indeed. As it is in the United States today. Any healthy polity will have a streak of conservatism. A healthy conservatism can be useful precisely in standing against a “conservative” movement that has embraced nostalgic bitterness and anger. True conservatives can appeal against that movement’s hatreds by citing the old principles of the Declaration and provisions of the Constitution. But a healthy polity has to have a progressive element as well. It’s progressive types who can most easily explain, for example, how much we’ll damage our future well-being if we slash away at medical research or halt immigration. Dogmatic progressivism is a trap. But an appreciation of progress is not. The normal political fights in a free country are between conservatives and progressives. At a time when there are urgent threats to what is best in both traditions, those two can come together to defend a broader set of liberal principles that transcend conservatism and progressivism. If conservatives tend to do this with an overlay of backwards-looking nostalgia, forward-looking progressives can correct them by emphasizing a brighter future ahead. And so, if I react to the Knicks’ loss by thinking back to the glories of the past, I also value my fellow Knicks loyalists of a more progressive bent who see defeat and enthusiastically reply: “Wait till next year!” Zelensky Has Some Cards, Tooby Cathy Young Sunday is likely to be remembered among the most extraordinary days in Russia’s three-plus-year war in Ukraine. It was the day Ukraine carried out a massive drone attack on military airports across Russia, destroying or severely damaging as many as 41 fighter planes—mostly Soviet-era missile-carrying bombers Russia no longer has the capacity to build. If that number is accurate, Russia has lost as much as one-third of its strategic bombing force—and a part of its nuclear triad. (While only 13 hits are confirmed by satellite imagery right now, that data is limited to one of the five bases that were hit.) The strike, apparently planned in a sophisticated intelligence operation over the course of some 18 months, has been rightly described as “stunning,” “incredible” and “fantastic.” And it raises some questions. Is this attack, carried out on the eve of the next round of the Russia/Ukraine talks in Istanbul, a game-changer? And how does it fit into the bigger picture of the current state of Russia’s war in Ukraine? Until Sunday, the Russia-Ukraine negotiations had been mostly dormant (and deadly). Russia made unworkable and frankly insulting proposals along the lines of “give us four regions now or we’ll take six later” and generally made it clear that it wanted nothing short of a disarmed and subjugated Ukraine. This “diplomacy” was punctuated, on a regular basis, with horrifying strikes that targeted Ukrainian civilians. Donald Trump made accusatory and vaguely threatening noises in Russia’s direction, lamenting Vladimir Putin’s bafflingly aggressive behavior but always trotting out some excuse to give Russia (and himself) a little more time before imposing new sanctions. Meanwhile, Russian and Ukrainian forces remained locked in grueling positional warfare in the battlefields of Ukraine, with Russia making very modest gains at tremendous cost to its own troops. The big news, before Sunday’s strike, was the apparent start of Russia’s summer offensive, which Putin evidently hopes will result in big enough gains to justify the Kremlin’s current intransigence. The anti-Ukraine contingent in the West has latched on to the narrative that Ukrainian defenses are deteriorating or even collapsing. It’s a claim that hasn’t actually died after the Ukrainian drone attack on Russian military airfields; instead that success has been spun as a sign of “weakness” by Ukraine, or desperation. But even Russia’s war-hawk “milbloggers” know better, as a roundup of their frenzied reactions shows. What’s really happening on the ground in Ukraine? Certainly nothing close to “collapse,” as University of St. Andrew (Edinburgh) strategic studies professor Phillips O’Brien convincingly argues in his newsletter. He writes that there is an “uptick in offensive operations”—most notably, an incursion into the Sumy province, which Russia apparently intends to try to turn into a “buffer zone” and where it has recently deployed 50,000 soldiers in addition to some 75,000 who were already in the region. Yet despite this massive military presence, Russian troops have been unable to push deeper than three miles into Ukrainian territory, gaining barely over half a mile in the past week because of Ukrainian defenses. Likewise, while the Ukrainian Armed Forces are having some real problems in parts of the Donetsk region, particularly in the Liman/Pokrovsk sector of the frontlines, they have continued to counterattack, sometimes regaining lost ground. Against this backdrop, the daring drone strike on Russian military airfields is a masterstroke: a morale booster for Ukrainians and a reminder to the Kremlin that there are no safe spaces on Russian territory anymore. Will Trump also get the message that his favorite strongman isn’t that strong and that Volodymyr Zelensky actually does have some cards? Maybe not. But between Ukraine and Trump, it certainly isn’t Ukraine that looks like a loser right now. The End of Opennessby Andrew Egger Yesterday, Illinois Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi told CBS’s Face the Nation that the White House’s revocation of Chinese students’ visas would be met with “cheering” by the Chinese Communist Party. “They want the scientists and the entrepreneurs and the engineers who can come and help their economy,” the congressman said. “And so we are probably helping them, as well as other countries, more than helping ourselves with this policy.” When I read Krishnamoorthi’s comments, I thought about VIPKid. VIPKid is a Chinese online tutoring company, originally founded to connect Chinese children with English tutors in the West. In the years after its founding in 2014, the company became a major success, paying tens of thousands of mostly U.S. and Canadian teachers hourly rates to hold one-on-one lessons with hundreds of thousands of mostly Chinese students.¹ In 2021, however, China banned VIPKid and other services connecting Chinese kids with Western English teachers. The change was billed as part of a broader effort, known as “double reduction,” to ease educational pressures on overworked Chinese students. But many argued that China—which also banned foreign textbooks and made “Xi Jinping Thought” a subject of mandatory school instruction the same year—was quietly trying to limit Western influences on their youth. “There is another aim, which is to lock out Western culture,” writer and Chinese expat Guo Baosheng told Radio Free Asia at the time. “It’s all in the service of political stability for the regime.” Just four years ago, “double reduction” seemed part of a familiar story: an autocratic regime shrinking suspiciously away from contact with the outside world, crimping its own people’s freedom in the process. Now, four years later, further U.S.-China educational decoupling is coming from our side. America’s policymakers have lost their confidence in our system and in openness in general. They no longer believe that growing contact between free and repressed peoples will lead to a growing desire for freedom everywhere. Today, it isn’t China indulging the impulse to limit its peoples’ and institutions’ freedom to serve an ideological agenda, it’s us. AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick HitsAMERICA IS BEING RESPECTED AGAIN: In other “America’s idiocy is China’s gain” news, Axios reports this morning on a new global-favorability poll showing America’s reputation sagging and China’s surging. The Morning Consult poll, which surveyed residents of 13 major nations outside the United States and Canada, found a net favorability of 8.8 points for China and -1.5 points for America. Back in January 2024, the same poll found the United States with a favorability rating above 20 points abroad and China’s popularity underwater. “Since January 2025, the overwhelming majority of countries simultaneously exhibit worsening views of the United States and improving views of China,” writes Morning Consult’s Jason McMann, per Axios. “Only in Russia have views of America meaningfully improved.” GOING TO A DARK PLACE: If you didn’t believe things were getting out of hand, here are a few immigration-enforcement snapshots from this weekend.
All these stories come amid a broader administration push for federal law enforcement to dramatically accelerate immigration arrests. Back in January, the Washington Post reported that ICE had been instructed to ramp up daily arrests to at least “1,200 to 1,500.” Last week, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told Fox News that the new goal was at least 3,000 arrested migrants per day. He communicated the same number to ICE brass in a tense meeting last week, according to Axios: “Miller’s directive and tone had people leaving the meeting feeling their jobs could be in jeopardy if the new targets aren’t reached.” Ordering law enforcement to hit arrest quotas: What could go wrong? BIDEN CLONES: Shouldn’t somebody be monitoring Grandpa’s internet usage? In a Truth Social post yesterday, Trump shared a wild message from a supporter: “There is no #JoeBiden - executed in 2020. #Biden clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see. >#Democrats don’t know the difference.” Wow, you don’t say! On the one hand, this post is such howling unfiltered internet-conspiracy nonsense that it’s hard to imagine even Trump going further with it than a Truth Social repost. On the other hand, this sort of thing is breaking e-containment more and more recently. We’re in a world where the secretary of health and human services believes in chemtrails. Whether it’s a momentary blip or something that’s going to harden into a Trump obsession, “There is no Joe Biden” is an unsettling reminder of the lunatic fever swamp in which the president routinely marinates his brain. Enjoy going about your day with the knowledge that, at any given moment, the president may be scrolling away on his phone, actively making himself more conspiratorial and paranoid. Cheap Shots
1 My mom, a former second-grade teacher, was one of those tutors, picking it up as a flexible part-time gig after retiring from the classroom. My wife, a former kindergarten teacher, dipped her toe in as well after deciding to become a stay-at-home mom. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber. We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here.
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Don’t Buy the Nostalgia Trump Is Selling
June 02, 2025
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