It sure he feels like 1979 again. Iran is at war with the West. Gas prices have been rising for weeks. Moscow aims to take advantage of a distracted White House. The party that controls Washington is watching the election with concern. Flared pants and jumpsuits are back! The same with cigarettes. Steven Spielberg is riding high after making a film about humans meeting aliens. (Not to be outdone, the real space mission is back too.) U2 released new music. Even the Pittsburgh Pirates are good.
And if we seem to be back in time, then, well, Donald Trump would seem ready for whatever comes next, because the man has lived his whole life like it’s the 1980s.
He embraces the big-big-big ethos of the decade, with his style gold-plated with the mantra “greed is good”. His views have been fueled by an age of exuberance where excess was the norm and lavish displays of wealth and power were celebrated in pop culture and Trump’s Manhattan. (The pink marble part of his Trump Tower mansion looks as it did when it opened in 1983.) It was also a time when New York City was defined by extreme wealth stratification and racial unrest, a time of high crime and corruption. To this day, Trump’s touchstones almost seem to be preserved in amber from that decade: Sylvester Stallone, George Steinbrenner, Hulk Hogan, the musical Cat. This was the age of over-the-top displays of patriotism and even ingenuity; words Let’s make America great again he was inside. (It’s true—Ronald Reagan got there first.) This was when Trump became a celebrity, when he still had youth on his side. In his mind, at least, he hasn’t left.
Favorite Trump era it may also be shaping his view of war with Iran. It was then that Trump revealed himself to be an Iran hawk, who believed that President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to rescue the hostages in the US embassy announced a sign of US weakness to the world. In a series of statements during his decade as a public figure, Trump said he would punish Iran, and began to float his now-familiar stance. take oil. Indeed, those 1980s foreign policy debates with Iran were when the media began speculating that one day Trump might run for president. Lessons learned decades ago have informed his shocking approach to this war, which has included the assassination of Iran’s leader, the destruction of its military, and a threat on Tuesday to wipe out the nation’s “entire civilization.” A volatile ceasefire it is now in place. Republicans hope that this Iran crisis will not hurt the White House like it did 47 years ago.
Carter presidency it was largely destroyed when, in the middle of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, militants seized the American embassy in Tehran. Weeks later, Ruhollah Khomeini, an Islamic preacher, emerged as the new supreme leader of the theocratic government and fueled strong anti-American sentiment. Military rescue efforts were unsuccessful, and conflict engulfed the United States throughout the presidential election year. Carter later earned credit for preventing the situation from getting worse, but at the time, he looked weak and powerless. In October 1980, the young Trump, then just 34 years old, gave an interview that it is believed to be the first time he publicly weighed in on foreign policy.
“That this country sits back and allows a country like Iran to hold our hostages, to my way of thinking, is appalling, and I don’t think they could do that to any other country,” Trump said during an interview on NBC with gossip columnist Rona Barrett. When Barrett asked if he would advocate sending troops to free hostages and seize Iran’s resources, Trump responded in the affirmative, saying, “I think right now we would be an oil-rich nation, and I believe we should have.”
It looks familiar. As far as we can tell, this is also the first time that Trump has publicly contemplated taking another nation’s oil. It wouldn’t be the last. Reagan won by a landslide a month later, although he never took any oil. As a kiss to shed Carter, the hostages were released on the day of the Republican inauguration.
Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian and professor at Rice University, told us that “it almost became commonplace in the party in 1980 to say, If I were president, I wouldn’t be as weak as Carter. I would bomb Iran into the Stone Age.” But Brinkley warned that Trump may have overcompensated. In his efforts to show toughness and strength, he releases ridiculous statements that will not threaten Iran’s democracy (after all, their leaders talk like that too) and that, in the end, will leave him with few good options. “It seems like he wants to live by that 1980 threat. It’s like a ‘crazy theory’ of foreign policy,” Brinkley said.
White House Photo Office / PhotoQuest / Getty
US President Ronald Reagan (1911 – 2004) shaking hands with real estate developer Donald Trump in the reception line in the Blue Room of the White House, Washington DC. November 3, 1987.
Bin the late 1980sTrump was a famous real estate developer, best-selling author, and tabloid publication. But what he said then is a good review of how he rules now; indeed, for a politician who has few consistent ideologies (except on tariffs; he’s always liked tariffs), it’s surprising how Trump’s views on Iran haven’t changed much. A New York Times A transcript of an October 1987 speech in New Hampshire stated that the businessman suggested that the United States “should attack Iran and seize some of its oil fields in retaliation for what he called Iran’s bullying of the United States.” A few months later, Trump complained to Phil Donahue (we told you this was a story from the 1980s) that America’s allies were not doing enough to protect access to oil in the Persian Gulf. The following year, Trump told it Guardian that if he ever ran for president, he would be “tough” on Iran, declaring that “one shot hit one of our people or our ships, and I’d dial a number on Kharg Island. I’d go in and take it.” Almost 40 years later, the Pentagon has already ground invasion plan to do this. It is awaiting Trump’s approval if the ceasefire collapses.
Tehran is proving as difficult for Trump as it was for Carter. Confused by the military success of his bombing campaign in Iran last summer and the operation to capture Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela in January, Trump believed that the joint operation with Israel would be over in a matter of days, weeks at most. He broke his promise not to start a new war in the Middle East. However, despite the elimination of many military targets, Tehran’s regime has proven to be stable and able to attack its Gulf neighbors. It took control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil passes. Energy prices have risen; of Trump vote numbers they are drowned. And despite US claims of superior air power, Iran shot down a fighter jet last week, sparking a fierce search and rescue operation.
The mission was created by Operation Eagle Clawthe failed 1980 military effort to rescue Americans that took place during the Iran hostage crisis. The plan at the time was complex, involving landing cargo planes and helicopters in a remote desert area, getting US forces into Iran, and preparing them to move to Tehran for a coordinated hostage rescue. But the mission failed in what was supposed to be a showcase, exposing the army’s inability to work across the board and execute complex operations.
The result was a multi-year basic overhaul of the US military. The Pentagon began to embrace “joint operations,” and America established a Special Operations Command, which is dedicated to such missions. The Pentagon also reevaluated how it thought about what transport planes could do. During Operation Eagle Claw, C-130s were a key tactical asset; one landed at a makeshift desert airfield and eventually evacuated the injured crew from the failed mission. Almost 46 years to the day, C-130s were part of a rescue mission in Iran, again tasked with making a quick landing inside the country and then evacuating.
But the rescue, carried out on Easter Sunday morning, was followed by a social media post from the president in which he wrote, “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!” and added: “All the good praises belong to Allah.” Trump stepped up pressure on Iran on Tuesday, writing that “All civilization will die tonight” if the stream was not opened. Hours later, Trump backed off the threat, and a two-week ceasefire was implemented. The weak settlement, however, only seemed to strengthen Iran’s claim over the sea; if that is permanent, it will be difficult to see the war as anything other than a strategic defeat for the United States.
Trump and his aides, however, would hear none of it. They insisted that the war has been won, that Iran’s regime has been replaced, and that, as the president put it this morning on social media, we may soon see a “Golden Age of the Middle East!!!” How was that possible? Trump aides pointed us to the theory of the insanesaying the president’s unpredictability, along with his genocidal threat to destroy Iran, forced the deal. “That’s it Contract Artchild,” a White House aide yelled at us.
The book was actually published in 1987.
Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Nancy A. Youssef contributed reporting.
