noun
The feeling in which a sense of nostalgia is felt, specifically for when Donald Trump was in office of the United States of America.
“Man, I really miss it when Trump was president. Everything was better.”
“Feeling some Trump-stalgia, are we?”
“What”
One common explanation of Trump-stalgia is that many people give the former president a mulligan for 2020, attributing all the bad things that happened in his final year to the Covid pandemic (and ignoring the extent to which Trump’s botched response to the pandemic added to the death toll). That is, when they say “four years ago” they actually mean “before the pandemic.” That surely explains part of what’s going on.
But there are also problems with this story. If Trump gets a pass for the economic and social damage inflicted by the pandemic, why shouldn’t Biden get a similar pass for problems that manifested on his watch but surely reflected delayed effects of Covid disruptions?
[…]
Negative assessments of the economy, as opposed to personal well-being, may in part reflect a familiar if frustrating consequence of inflation: When prices and wages are both rising, people tend to feel that they earned their wage gains only to have inflation take them away.
And again, when voters are asked about their personal well-being as opposed to the state of the economy, they’re relatively positive — although even there, partisanship shades responses. Notably, some swing-state polls don’t just show that registered Republicans have a much worse view of the economy than Democrats; they also show Republicans offering a substantially worse assessment of their personal finances, which suggests that at least some people aren’t answering the question they were actually asked.
All that said, Trump-stalgia is undoubtedly a powerful force.
Biden helped lead us through a time of turmoil — much of which happened even before he took office — to a pretty good place, with very low unemployment, fairly low inflation and falling crime. But many Americans seem unaware of the good news; for example, the drop in crime doesn’t appear to have broken through to public consciousness at all. And there seems to be a romanticized vision of what things were like under Biden’s predecessor, which somehow omits the terrible things that happened in 2020.
So are you better off than you were four years ago? For most Americans, the answer is clearly yes. But for reasons that still remain unclear, many seem disinclined to believe it.
| Paul Krugman, The Peculiar Persistence of Trump-stalgia
Seems to be an example of Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds, which touched on ‘criminal scoundrels’:
Mackay saves particular scorn for popular romanticism surrounding the lives of certain criminal scoundrels, whereby said wrongdoers are thought virtuous in popular society; he also notes the marked emergence of quack medicine concurrent with meaningful advances in medical science. The acceptance into society of these phenomena is considered but another facet of the human crowd's inherent madness.