Opinion | How Trump Will Fail

After a four-year hiatus, we are once again compelled to go spelunking into the deeper caverns of Donald Trump’s brain.We climb under his ego, which interestingly makes up 87 percent of his neural tissue; we burrow beneath the nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain responsible for cheating at golf; and then, deep down at the core of the limbic system, we find something strange — my 11th grade history textbook.Over the past few months, and especially in his second Inaugural Address, Trump has gone all 19th century on us.

He seems to find in this period everything he likes: tariffs, Manifest Destiny, seizing land from weaker nations, mercantilism, railroads, manufacturing and populism.Many presidents mention George Washington or Abraham Lincoln in their inaugurals.

Who was the immortal Trump cited? William McKinley.You can tell what kind of conservative a person is by discovering what year he wants to go back to.For Trump, it seems to be sometime between 1830 and 1899.

“The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts,” he declared in his address.It’s easy to see the appeal.We were a boisterous, arriviste nation back then, bursting with energy, bombast and new money.

In 1840, there were 3,000 miles of railroad track in America.By 1900, there were roughly 259,000 miles of track.

Americans were known for being materialistic, mechanical and voracious for growth.In his book “The American Mind,” the historian Henry Steele Commager wrote of our 19th-century forebears: “Whatever promised to increase wealth was automatically regarded as good, and the American was tolerant, therefore, of speculation, advertising, deforestation and the exploitation of natural resources.” So Trumpian.It was a time when the national character was being forged not among the establishment circles in Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia but out on the frontier, by the wild ones, the uncouth ones.

It was the rugged experience of westward expansion, the historian Frederic...