"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

The Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner wrote those words in 1951. Yet, they could be a commentary on the political scene 75 years later.

No issue matters more to President Donald Trump than the results of the 2020 election. Despite newspaper investigations, congressional hearings and the results of over 60 legal challenges, he still says he won. This year, FBI agents in flak jackets seized boxes related to the presidential election six years ago in Fulton County, Georgia. After a Justice Department investigation, his former attorney general, William Barr, said, "He's become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff." The delusion must be contagious. No cabinet or judicial nominees will say Trump lost the election in their Senate confirmation hearings.

But living in the past for Trump and his MAGA movement goes back much further than 2020. Today's Republican Party, in control of both the White House and Congress, is still waging the Civil War, which history books tell us ended in 1865. In June 2020, Trump said bases named after soldiers of the Confederacy such as Fort Bragg, Fort Hood and Fort Benning were part of a "Great American Heritage" with a history of "freedom." In the past year, the Trump administration restored a memorial to a Confederate general in the nation's capital. Trump's appointees to the Supreme Court have ignored the clear language of the 15th Amendment in overturning statutes intended to protect the right of Black citizens to vote.

The Soviet Union fell in 1989, and with it ended the worldwide communist conspiracy. Not for Trump and the MAGA movement. The 2024 GOP platform pledged to stand up to "Marxist Prosecutors." One leading member of Congress said that "The Bolshevik takeover of the Democrat Party is in full swing." No, that wasn't Sen. Joe McCarthy 75 years ago; it was House Majority Leader Steve Scalise last month. The Republican Party seems to be living in the 1950s "subversion from within" theme of the Red Scare era.

For that matter, the MAGA leader seems determined to continue the War of 1812, when American war aims included conquering Canada from the British. Thomas Jefferson famously predicted that acquiring Canada would be "a mere matter of marching." Trump wants to march on, insisting, "Frankly, Canada should be the 51st state." In May 2025, when NBC's Kristen Welker asked him directly whether he would use military force to take Canada, Trump downplayed the idea but refused to categorically rule it out. (I wonder if the president knows that during the War of 1812, the British burned down the White House.)

Trump's obsession with looking to the past stands in sharp contrast to the outlook of other recent presidents. FDR's slogan in his 1936 campaign was "Forward with Roosevelt." During his reelection campaign, Bill Clinton pledged to build "a bridge to the 21st century." And a year before winning the White House, Barack Obama promised "change we can believe in."

Don't get me wrong. Having majored in history and gone on to graduate school, I firmly believe we cannot address current events without grasping their root causes. But driving national policy requires more than a rearview mirror. It demands that we keep our eyes on the road ahead.

Future threats such as floods, heat waves, rising oceans and once-in-a-century storms imperil tens of millions of Americans and billions more overseas. And yet Trump and his administration condemn solar power and embrace carbon fuels.

As Ukrainian drones that cost thousands of dollars sink Russian ships worth hundreds of millions, Trump wants to build hulking "Trump-class" battleships that will run an estimated $18 billion each. Such floating behemoths may be how naval strength was measured when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, but fleets of smart, cheap weapons will be the key to victory on the seas for the next generation.

Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" will increase the federal budget deficit by an estimated $4.7 trillion in the 2026-2035 decade, leaving it to future generations to pay off his profligacy, including tax cuts for himself and other one-percenters. And there will be fewer in those generations, leaving a smaller base of workers to shoulder the unfunded burden. In 1957, the birth rate approached four children per woman. Today it is barely more than one and a half.

Another danger to the American population is the growing threat of future pandemics. Trump and his choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are crippling the CDC and disdaining vaccines. Governmental corruption explodes while university research is slashed. Little is done about the regulation of artificial intelligence with its threat to future jobs, income, and human existence.

Amid all these burning issues, the president fiddles with erecting an Arc of Trump, inspired by an early-19th-century Paris monument, and decorating the White House in homage to the late-19th-century Gilded Age.

In his dystopian novel "1984," George Orwell wrote, "Who controls the past controls the future." If we Americans let this president and his allies control our history, they will leave our nation trapped in yesterday, wholly unprepared for tomorrow.

A renaissance man, Keith Raffel has served as the senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, started a successful internet software company, and had six books published including five novels and a collection of his columns. He currently spends the academic year as a resident scholar at Harvard. You can learn more about him at keithraffel.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at creators.com.

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