Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan explains his intentions for a second term. On the 2024 Republican Party Platform, Trump lists 20 core promises that are intended to make America great again. The promises are both political and cultural, ranging from “seal the border and stop the migrant invasion” to “make college campuses safe and patriotic again.”

But missing from the Republican Platform and Trump’s television debate with Kamala Harris is the answer to the question on which his 20 core promises rest: When was America truly great? 

To find an answer to that question, it is vital to look back to Trump’s first run for the presidency and an overlooked interview from 2016. In that interview, Trump did not consider the Ronald Reagan years “great,” for  Reagan was not his kind of conservative. “I liked Reagan,” Trump would say, “but I never felt we did great on trade” during his administrations.

For Trump, America was great during two earlier 20th-century periods. The first was “the turn of the century,” when America was building a machine that was “really based on entrepreneurship.” In his view, that was “a pretty wild time for this country.”

The second period of American greatness was “the late ’40s and ’50s.” During this time, America’s strength was, in Trump’s opinion, so overwhelming that America could do whatever it felt it “had to do.” As he put it, “We were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war.”

Trump never says exactly what he would have done as president during these periods of American greatness, and that is most revealing about the interview.

In the early 20th century, it is easy to imagine Trump seeking the company of such wealthy figures as Morgan, Carnegie, and Rockefeller. But how Trump, who has constantly talked about lifting the burdens government puts on industry, would have reacted to the Republican presidency of Theodore Roosevelt is a different matter.

Roosevelt proclaimed himself pro-business. In his First Annual Message to Congress in 1901, he lauded “the captains of industry” who have “on the whole done great good to our people.” But, he also believed the 19th-century laws that once regulated trusts and corporations had become insufficient. New forms of “proper governmental supervision” were required. Roosevelt wanted the federal government to be active not only in regulating the power of corporations but enforcing labor law requirements such as the eight-hour workday.

Roosevelt was outspoken in his defense of the environment. In contrast to Trump, who rolled back more than 100 environmental rules affecting clean air, clean water, and wildlife, Roosevelt believed “forest and water problems” were among the most vital issues for the United States. He wanted additions to our forest reserves to be made “whenever practicable.”

The post-World War II years were another period that Trump admired. The US emerged from the war as a military superpower. It was not until 1949 that the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb and in 1953 its first hydrogen bomb.

But in this period, America’s leaders saw greatness as much more than military dominance. In helping Western Europe recover from World War II, America, under the leadership of Secretary of State George Marshall, Army chief of staff during World War II, instituted a foreign aid program, the 1948 Marshall Plan, based on the premise, as Marshall put it, that Europe’s needs were “much greater than her present ability to pay.” The program, which received widespread Republican support, reflected the bipartisan belief that America’s postwar prosperity should be shared. 

Trump’s recent assertion that America should not defend any NATO nation unwilling to spend at least two percent of its gross domestic product on defense would have been anathema to government leaders in 1949 when NATO was founded.

In the end, how much America’s past greatness matters to Trump remains vague. What is not vague is how the vagueness helps him. It allows his supporters, especially those who feel they have lost status in recent years, to fill in whatever era they would like to return to without Trump having to lift a finger and fall into a nostalgia trap of past glories of purported golden ages.

The problem for Trump between now and the election will be reaching beyond his base and growing his support in the midst of a now more popular Democratic candidate. Trump is relying heavily on the idea of making America as great as it once was but, ironically, many of the very policies Trump is advocating now—from increased isolationism and combative relations with other nations to fewer guardrails to protect the environment—are at odds with the ideas that were prominent and quite powerful in shaping American power and influence in the very epochs when Trump believed that America was great.

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