Peter Baker, NY Times - On matters big and small, Mr. Trump has hit the rewind button. At the broadest level, he has endeavored to reverse the globalization and internationalism that have defined U.S. leadership around the globe since World War II, under presidents of both parties. But even at a more prosaic level, it has become evident that Mr. Trump, 79, the oldest president ever inaugurated, simply prefers things the way he remembers them from his youth, or even before that.
He has made clear that he wants to return to an era when “Cats” was the big hit on Broadway, not “Hamilton”; when military facilities were named after Confederate generals, not gay rights leaders; when coal was king and there were no windmills; when straws were plastic, not paper; when toilets flushed more powerfully; when there weren’t so many immigrants; when police officers weren’t discouraged from being rough on suspects; when diversity was not a goal in hiring or college admissions or much of anything else.
Just last month, Mr. Trump suggested going back to calling the Pentagon chief the “secretary of war,” a title retired in 1947, rather than secretary of defense, a term he dismissed as “politically correct.” Just this month, he again talked about reopening Alcatraz, the famed island prison in San Francisco Bay that was closed in 1963. Just last weekend, he said the Washington Commanders football team should not have dropped the name Redskins, which it did in 2020 amid heightened awareness of racial sensitivities.
Mr. Trump suggests that he is on a mission to halt what he considers the degradation of America by “radical left lunatics” and return the country to better times. “We’ve seen some of our political system attempting to overthrow the timeless American principles and other pillars of our liberty, and replace them with some of the most noxious ideas in human history, ideas that have been proven false,” he said earlier this month. MORE
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