How Trump Channels the 1970s

President Trump has brought the spirit of the 1970s into the Oval Office. If there is one consistent message that has come out of this White House, it is a message born out of the turbulent decade: Don’t trust any institution.

Every president carries with them the zeitgeist of a period that shaped their values and vision. In recent decades, Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush embodied the patriotism and national bravado of the early Cold War in the 1950s—an unyielding belief in American Exceptionalism. To the consternation of Representative Newt Gingrich, President Bill Clinton emerged as the voice of the 1960s counter-culture even though his domestic policies were often at odds with the legacy of FDR and LBJ. President George W. Bush championed the conservative ethos of Reagan’s America in the 1980s, with its zealous belief in free markets, deregulation, and tax cuts. President Barack Obama promoted the hard-headed, data-loving, problem-solving pragmatic attitude of the 1990s when the end of the Cold War suggested that almost any challenge could be met.

For President Trump, it’s all about the 1970s. That bleak decade saw the nation turn against most of the institutions that had been central since World War II. The quagmire in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal that forced Richard Nixon’s resignation turned many Americans, on the left and the right, against the federal government. The post-Nixonian presidency came to be viewed as an office whose holders should not be trusted. When President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon in September 1974 for any crimes that he might have committed, all hope of healing the nation went right out the window. Jimmy Carter’s campaign in 1976 revolved around the basic promise that voters could trust him. Though Congress looked good at the height of the Watergate investigation in 1973, polls showed public confidence in the legislative branch falling thereafter. The number of Americans who trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time declined from almost 80 percent in 1964 to 25 percent when Reagan took office in 1981.

Intelligence and law-enforcement institutions, which had been on the front line in the fight against communism, came under fire. The late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, once one of the most feared men in Washington, became a national symbol of how the bureau abused its authority—spying on citizens and intimidating opponents—as a result of exposés and declassified material that revealed the ruthless manner in which Hoover wielded power. On March 8, 1971, anti-war activists broke into an FBI office in a Philadelphia suburb to steal documents proving the kind of subversive activity the agency had conducted. They found documents even more shocking than they had expected, revealing the notorious COINTELPRO program (a massive counter-intelligence program conducted against domestic groups like civil-rights and anti-war activists). “When you talked to people outside the movement about what the FBI was doing, nobody wanted to believe it,” one of them recalled when justifying the break in. In introducing the story for NBC’s Nightly News, the reporter John Chancellor told viewers that “Secret FBI memos made public today show the late J. Edgar Hoover ordered a nationwide campaign to disrupt the activities of the New Left. He ordered his agents not only to expose New Left groups, but to take action against them to neutralize them.”

“The whole tenor of the conversation about the FBI changed,” the historian David Garrow explained of the 1970s. “There was less deference and more suspicion, particularly from Democrats.” The congressional investigations headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho and Representative Otis Pike of New York in 1975 and 1976 produced shocking revelations about the tactics that CIA officials employed, including covert assassination efforts using poison darts and exploding cigars, as well as illegal surveillance on American citizens. The CIA, Church said, had become a “rogue elephant.” The senator warned of the “total tyranny of the CIA” that would leave Americans with “no place to hide.” ...