The Meming MAGA Romantics

If you squint—ok, shutter—your eyelids enough, you can almost make out James Gandolfini’s dipthonged drawl.

“He was a great Italian explorer,” a White House aide pronounced while handing President Trump a proclamation formally and federally recognizing Columbus Day. The echo of Tony Soprano ring crystal for qui habet aures. It’s a dashed shame the moment was missed to also declare: “In the White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero. End of story.” I really hope someone got fired for that blunder.

Just a few neurotic Twitterers caught the fleet message in what was otherwise a coordinated troll. The Genoese quester was never nobbled of his fedgov-imprimatured holiday. Not even in the statue-sundering days of 2020 was colonizing Chris deprived his Monday sabbath—though his marble likeness suffered a forced soaking in Baltimore, a mob deposition in St. Paul, and the tumbril treatment in Boston. The worst he’s suffered, besides innumerable denunciations from wool-vested professors accusing him of being a human H bomb before snoring freshmen, is having to share his day with a bunch of child-sacrificing anthropophagists. There’s worse company a man can keep. At least Columbus isn’t paired with International Pansexual and Panromantic Visibility Day.

Trump’s recognition of the grade-school hol would have been just another perfunctory presidential task, like naming a post office or feigning a mourning mien for parents of a soldier killed by keffiyeh-and-Kalashnikov insurgents. That the President’s flunkeys found it fit to slip a ‘90s prestige-TV meme in evinces the real animating motivation of what might be called the MAGA Romantics.

The President himself has his fixed ruling concerns: reshoring and refabricating America’s industrial base, dodging foreign quagmires, cutting transnational deals, patching the perceived bloodletting of his country, scratching down his handicap, having his name embossed on a custom Diet Coke bottle.

Likewise, his top-level advisers have their respective hobby horses: Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller longs to trebuchet 20 million illegal immigrants into the Atlantic drink; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spoils to sock one of his admin-peers; Vice President Vance dreams of drafting a megadeath-caliber reply-tweet that will force a blue-tick lib to delete his account forever.

But the subaltern stratum of bureaucratic hands who must practically actuate the Administration’s agenda? Their vision is grander, higher-flown, cast in the daring firmament. Their aspirations are more Thomsian than testosterone.

Back at the dawn of the new Trump term, Mana Afsari profiled a new-ish espèce of political animal setting habitat along the Potomac. These “New Romantics” aren’t hopped up on wonkese about the “unsustainable trajectory of Social Security receipts relative to outlays” or “insurance-market risk pools” or “the dollar peg’s effect on domestic inflation in Argentina.” Nor are they enamored by Excel-generated line graphs, National Bureau of Economic Research pubs, or bylining The Hill op-eds spliced with RTX Corporation banner ads. Tory Matt Yglesias-stans, they are not.

They represent, both in a sartorial sense and in disposition, a throwback to an age before technified, expedited mass consumption.

The men—and yes, they are, in the main, of the kludgy sex—would rather frequent debate gatherings in “three-piece wool suits and matching pocket squares” than stalk down U Street in the early hours draped loosely in gym shorts and half-zips.

But unlike poet-at-hearts of old, they don’t quote snatches of Virgil in service to our history-bending president. They—as self-styled curmudgeons, they’ll take exception to my verb usage—meme, which is another way of saying converse within the lexicon of their time.

Some of these starry-eyed sincerists must have made it into the Trump Administration, if Twitter didos are any indication. Umbrella accounts like the Department of Homeland Security freely interpolate social media trends to promote their own mission, namely coffling unauthorized residents. Lately, the agency’s digital staffers have been invoking a lost America, posting a desktop-calendar mix of Rockwell and Kinkade portraits of midcentury idyll.

A nostalgic-nub: that receding country is only half-remembered by our aging cohort of boomer grays—those who can still recall the jay days of cherry phosphates and sockhops can’t win TikTok’s veri-game.

The millennial members have resorted to invoking an era fondly remembered by their core audience: fellow thirtysomethings. Thus, the nineties, garnished with a pinch of early noughties and a dollop of Day-Glo eighties. In comes Tony Soprano’s much-viralized rant on the courage of Christopher Columbus. Also enters the mashup of the original Pokémon theme song with flashes of ICE agents rounding up illegal alieni. Also lopes in the famous “Billy Madison” admonishment. Then pipes the pièce de meme résistance: a glossed montage of America peak-’80s set to an instrumentalized “Friday I’m in Love,” topped with the caption “life after all criminal aliens are deported.” The bouncing kaleidoscope of Reagan-era snaps resembles Susan Choi’s description of memory: “fragmented juddering filmstrip of image and sound.” It also probably made Robert Smith tear his scrubby follicles out.

The inspired fifty-second strip is a pure candy-coated lam to the limbic system. It’s also a pained bay for Housman’s “happy highways” that we “cannot come again.”

The MAGA Romantics have internalized sociologist Paul Connerton’s notion that “images of the past commonly legitimate a present social order.” If America can’t be restored through DOGE cuts, or tariffing Chinese car manufacturers, or immolating Iranian nuclear reactors, then perhaps our national spirit can be renewed with an intern-produced Reel of ICE agents tackling day-laborers to mellifluous shouts of Go! Go! Power Rangers!

Uncle Sam wants you to “Be Kind, Rewind and Retvrn!“