The final night of last week’s Republican National Convention felt less like a political coronation and more like a rerun of I Love the ’80s. Onstage, wrestler Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt and roared into the mic, stumping for fellow garish ’80s personality Donald Trump.

As viewers wondered whether they were hallucinating, Hogan reminisced about a scene that took place during both men’s glory era. “The last time I was up onstage, Donald Trump was sitting ringside at the Trump Plaza, I was bleeding like a pig, and I had won the world title right in front of Donald J. Trump,” he said. He was presumably referencing one of Trump’s late-1980s WrestleMania appearances—which, technically speaking, actually took place at Atlantic City Convention Hall (though they were billed as taking place at Trump Plaza).

The RNC was full of other talismans from four decades ago, when Trump was atop the zeitgeist. Linda McMahon, the WWE matriarch who began doing business with Trump back then, said from the podium that Trump is “a fighter” with “the heart of a lion and the soul of a warrior.” Lee Greenwood, the Grammy-winning country singer best known for his early ’80s political-campaign hit, “God Bless the USA,” performed that 40-year-old track.

When Trump wanted to connect with younger audience members, he broke out a not-so-current movie reference—likening migrants to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial-killer-slash-cannibal popularized in the 1991 film Silence of the Lambs. Somehow, Trump’s actual statements about Lecter are even more alarming than that sentence would have you believe.

“The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner,” Trump said of the fictional cannibal, whom he has been name-dropping on the 2024 campaign trail in what New York magazine called one of the former president’s “most bizarre and baffling” rally rants.

He remixed the reference to the character, famously played by Anthony Hopkins, at other campaign events to similarly nonsensical effect. “The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’s a wonderful man,” Trump said in Wildwood, New Jersey, as if he was toasting an old friend who recently passed away instead of a homicidal fictional stranger. For a folksy spin, he added, “He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner.” For some reason, Trump offered Lecter a “congratulations,” and, in other venues, has reportedly described him as “legendary” and “a nice fellow.” (Hopkins has said Trump’s statements “shocked and appalled” him.)

Additional musical entertainment was provided by Kid Rock, who performed his 2000 single “American Bad Ass”—a programming decision so left-field and (nearly) last-century that even Trump’s wife, Melania, couldn’t hold back her smirks.

This was not the first Donald Trump RNC filled with unappealing, pop-culture-adjacent speakers decades past their sell-by date. The 2016 convention featured 1980s sitcom star Scott Baio, veterans of MTV’s The Real World turned political figures Sean Duffy and Rachel Campos-Duffy, ’90s New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, and ’90s underwear model and soap star Antonio Sabàto Jr.

Readers, America still voted him president.

Had any bigger acts, or, rather, any acts relevant to more recent decades been available for the RNC gig, Trump likely would’ve loved to have booked them. Unfortunately for the former president, Steven Tyler, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, Ozzy Osbourne, and Phil Collins have all objected to the presidential candidate using their music for political purposes. (Additional artists refusing Trump’s appropriation of their art include Adele; Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones; members of R.E.M., Queen, and the Village People; and the estates of George Harrison, Isaac Hayes, Prince, and Tom Petty.)

Trump’s stuck-in-the-’80s nature is nothing new. He has been talking about the decade since it ended 35 years ago. But after Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race this weekend, following mounting concerns about his own age, it seems like time to ask whether we want to entrust our nation, again, to a person whose pop-culture references are put-him-in-a-home old and unintelligible.

This is a man who equates the size of his crowds to Springsteen concerts, reportedly tried to appoint ’80s action hero Sylvester Stallone to the White House, and recently name-dropped Robin Leach and the television relic Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to what was surely a confused rally audience in Concord, New Hampshire. This is a man who, just six months ago, quoted the same Clint Eastwood film Ronald Reagan was quoting in 1985—only Reagan’s callback made sense. Reagan had told tax increasers to “make my day” at an American Business Conference—a topical and timely nod to Eastwood’s movie Sudden Impact, which had been released less than two years prior. Trump brought the movie up about four decades later while…rambling about looters at an Iowa event: “Remember Clint Eastwood? ‘Make my day.’ He had the gun,” Trump said, before serving a word salad about “crooked Joe Biden” and “bacon costs” skyrocketing in America.

Here’s a wide sampling of Trump’s other, outdated pop-culture talking points—all offered up during the “no one asked” portions of his appearances in the last decade:

• Whoopi Goldberg’s 1996 basketball movie Eddie, for which Trump filmed a cameo. “She said, ‘You’re so great. There’s nobody like you in the world!” Trump said just three months ago during a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt, before expressing a sense of betrayal that the hosts of The View now consider him to be like “the plague.” He added, “You know how many times I did The View?” (In June, Goldberg spit onstage after breaking her personal vow not to mention Trump’s name on the show.)
• ’70s and ’80s ballet icon Mikhail Baryshnikov—who, Trump claimed during a political rally in Arizona, once wanted to talk to him about Michael Jackson’s moonwalking. (Baryshnikov has spoken about Trump too; in 2016, the dancer turned Sex and the City love interest called Trump a “totalitarian opportunist” whose speeches reminded him of his time in the Soviet Union.)
• The 1970s movie Patton, which starred George C. Scott as US general George S. Patton during World War II. During a 2021 appearance in Iowa, Trump wondered aloud whether he could use a scene from the film during his rallies. “What a great thing that [movie] was. George C. Scott, George C. Scott. I don’t know. Did he win the Academy Award?” Trump asked no one in particular. “Did the movie? I think so. Something like that.” (The film and Scott did, in fact, win the best-picture and best-actor Oscar, though Scott refused to accept his.)
• Michael Jackson’s “honestly, bad, bad, bad surgery,” which Trump brought up, unprompted, in a 2016 CNN Town Hall. Presumably talking about Jackson’s ’90s nose jobs, Trump continued: “He had people that did numbers on him that were just unbelievable—facially—and, you know, the plastic surgeons. But Michael was an unbelievable talent who actually lost his confidence.” (Jackson’s brother Jermaine responded by tweeting, “‘Friends’ don’t pay tribute by peddling b.s. theories about Michael’s ‘loss in confidence’. This fool Trump needs to sit down.”)
• Barbra Streisand’s visits to the White House during Bill Clinton’s years in office. After bringing up his ’90s memories at a 2020 rally in Minnesota, Trump credited the legendary singer, songwriter, and director for her looks. “She’s another beauty, by the way,” Trump rambled before determining, “I do like her voice. I do. I really do. Some of them I don’t like, even their voices.” (In her memoir, Streisand said the former president “lies as easily as he breathes.” She also wrote, “And I just couldn’t comprehend how he could tell all these lies with absolutely no guilt (clearly he’s not Jewish).”)
• Jennifer Aniston’s Friends pay being the same as her costars’. Trump always thought this was a boneheaded business deal on Aniston’s part because she was clearly the most valuable. “I read all about Friends, where they made $2 million an episode. And there were—how many of them? Five or something, right? Jennifer Aniston…all of them,” Trump said in a meandering 2015 speech in Macon, Georgia, before talking about the decades-old business deal. “And they had, like, a union, but they made a lot of money per episode. I would have not formed that union. If I were Jennifer, maybe I would have asked for more. But that’s okay, she’s a team player.”
• How Oprah attended the 2007 funeral of TV titan Roger M. King at Mar-a-Lago, an event so beautiful that Trump said he briefly considered getting into the funeral business. “Oprah used to really like me. She was here many times. She loved my key lime pie,” Trump said, clumsily unraveling a confusing anecdote to Dr. Phil earlier this summer. “We have key lime pie. And she loved a lot of things about Mar-a-Lago.”

• Dennis Rodman, the former Chicago Bulls and Apprentice star whom Trump claims Kim Jong Un enjoys. “I always said Dennis would be better than some of these stiffs that they used to send over to get to know him,” the former president told Clay Travis of Fox Sports in 2020, presumably using “stiffs” to mean diplomats. “And they’d send these people over and they—they went to Harvard and they’re great students, and great everything, but they had no chemistry whatsoever.”
• The Top Gun chapter of Tom Cruise’s career: “I mean, you can’t get much better than Top Gun, right? Great movie, right?” he told a Minnesota rally in 2020, during a well-trod rally bit that lurched from the strength of the country’s armed forces to the fact that the US’s fighter jet pilots are “better looking than Tom—they got the crew cut, they got the crap under their eyes, they got the whole deal.”
• Frank Sinatra’s and Elvis Presley’s mug shots, which Trump claims his 2023 mug shot somehow outperformed. “It just beat Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra by a lot, by the way, beat them by a lot. The number one mug shot of all time,” Trump said during a roundtable with Black business leaders last month. It was directly after claiming that his “Black support has gone through the roof” that Trump segued into the subject of mugshots.
• “Teddy Roosevelt, Norman Rockwell, the great Flo Ziegfeld, General Douglas MacArthur, George Gershwin, Frank Sinatra, and, in baseball alone, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson, and many, many others”—all of whom loved New York, as Trump pointed out at a rally in the Bronx in May.
• The late opera legend Luciano Pavarotti being “the greatest of all divas,” as he told his freezing supporters at a 2020 outdoor rally in Michigan. “He was an incredible talent with a most unbelievable voice.… He was very terrible to other people—to me he was nice.” (Trump reportedly returned the favor by asking Pavarotti for a refund after an early-aughts performance he didn’t like at one of his Atlantic casinos. Pavarotti’s family has since denounced Trump and asked him not to play the artist’s recordings at his campaign events.)

And just for fun, here is a speed-round of a few Trump takes on different pop-culture categories:

Newscasters: “You had the great Walter Cronkite,” Trump reminisced in a 2012 interview with Greta Van Susteren, about the most trusted man in America…in the 1960s and ‘70s. “When you watched him, you trusted him. He was like your father.” He likes other newscasters too, like Edward R. Murrow, the legendary 1950s newsman who “was great but I didn’t see him.”

Late-night hosts: “Johnny Carson was talented,” Trump conceded at a 2018 rally in South Carolina. “Where is Johnny Carson? Where is Johnny Carson?” he wondered in 2020, in another ramble about lackluster late-night programming, seemingly unable to understand why they don’t make talk-show hosts like Carson anymore.

Actors: “We used to have Cary Grant and Clark Gable and all these people,” Trump said during a Georgia rally this year. “Today we have—I won’t say names, because I don’t need enemies.” Not that this has stopped him previously. During a 2020 rally in Las Vegas, Trump revealed he isn’t much of a fan of comparatively younger actors: “I was never a fan of Brad Pitt, I will tell you. No, I thought he was a stiff. He was like a stiff, you know? He’s like a boring guy.”

Movies: “What I say is, make great movies, you know? Not this computerized crap, computerized garbage,” Trump harrumphed like a sitcom grandpa during the Las Vegas rally. “Can we get my Gone With The Wind back, please? Sunset Boulevard…so many great movies,” he said at a Colorado rally the day before.

Music and musicians: At a rally in Ohio this year, Trump name-checked the Rolling Stones’ 1969 track “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” “You know that song, right?” Trump said, claiming the lyrics “made no sense, but it was a good song, right?” During the Wildwood, New Jersey, rally—the same one where Trump called Hannibal Lecter “a wonderful man”—Trump volunteered that he tried a hot dog at the event where he was speaking. Then he said this: “Frank Sinatra told me a long time ago, ‘Never eat before you perform.’ I said, ‘I’m not performing.’”

If ever there was a coded plea to check a person out of a presidential campaign and park them at a table with a puzzle, it is this line: “Frank Sinatra told me a long time ago, ‘Never eat before you perform.’”