The boomers are back. Pushing 80 years old, the elderly presidents gathered at Donald Trump’s inauguration to apply, yet again, the boomerlock to the White House.
Ever since the second and third presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, died on the same day — July 4th, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — the American presidency has thrown up a goodly number of calendrical coincidences.
Presidents come in generational batches. At his inaugural address in 1961, president John F. Kennedy spoke of himself, the youngest man ever to be elected president: “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.”
President Donald J. Trump could not have said that. The same generation is still gripping the torch, refusing to hand it over. The baby boomers were born 1946-1965. Trump was born in June 1946, George W. Bush in July 1946 and Bill Clinton in August 1946. Three months, three presidents.
Barack Obama was born in 1961, a late boomer. In 2020, after 28 consecutive years of boomers in the White House, Americans had had enough. The boomerlock was broken; Joe Biden, born in 1942, was too old to be a boomer. The return of Trump is surely the last hurrah for the boomers — unless Hillary Clinton tries to succeed him.
In 1988, George H.W. Bush gushed over his manifestly inadequate running mate, Dan Quayle, on identity grounds, exulting that he was “born in the middle of the century, in the middle of the country.” Quayle, born 1947, was an outreach to the vast cohort of boomer voters. Bush the Elder would come to resent them; in 1992 the twin-boomer ticket of Bill Clinton/Al Gore defeated the WWII hero. They did it again in 1996, beating Robert Dole, a WWII veteran who nearly died in battle.
JFK was proud to be the first born in the 20th century (1917). He was followed by Lyndon B. Johnson (1908), Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (both born in 1913). Then came Ronald Reagan (1911), preceded and succeeded by Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush (both born in 1924). Seven presidents within 16 years.
There are other instances. John Quincy Adams and his successor, Andrew Jackson — whose portrait returned to the Oval Office this week — were born less than four months apart in 1767. Lincoln and his successor, Andrew Johnson, were born six weeks apart in 1808/1809. The years 1856, 1857 and 1858 yielded three presidents, serving in reverse order of age, Theodore Roosevelt first, succeeded by William Howard Taft and then Woodrow Wilson.
But there is nothing quite like the boomer presidents, who have brought distinctive generational qualities with them.
Unlike the presidents of 1924, Carter and Bush Sr., they did not serve in combat. Clinton, Bush Jr. and Trump all deployed cunning or connections to avoid being sent to Vietnam.
The early boomers, who came of age in the 1960s, rebelled against traditional moral boundaries. Clinton transgressed and was winkingly contrite about it. Bush led a generally dissolute life, until he quit drinking and began his days with bible reading — representing those boomers who, literally and figuratively, sobered up. Trump is contrary to type as a teetotaller but has revelled in his other foibles. The arc of boomer cultural influence is captured from Clinton to Trump, from the apologetically indulgent to the exultantly brazen.
The early boomers were the first to grow up with television and the transformation of America into a consumer culture driven by entertainment. They learned early to exploit the image, from Clinton playing the saxophone on late-night TV, to Bush landing on an aircraft carrier, to Trump, the reality TV performer and sometime professional wrestling participant.
As the boomers aged, they shifted from hippie activism to yuppie self-absorption. Bill Clinton declared in 1995 that “the era of big government is over,” marking the end of the Great Society idealism of the 1960s. It wasn’t actually over, and the boomer presidents kept government growing, they just refused to pay for it. Big government without raising taxes became the Democratic approach during the boomerlock under Clinton and Obama. Big government with tax cuts was the Republican approach under Bush and Trump.
Rapid technological advance marked the boomer experience, and their presidents have kept up. Gore did not actually invent the internet, but he was a player in government investments that gave rise to it. Obama had his BlackBerry. And Trump used social media to fuel his political rise and as an instrument of governance. The 2025 inauguration, with its array of tech billionaires seated ahead of the cabinet, marked an apotheosis of American confidence in progress through technology.
In the 1980s the titans of finance were the “masters of the universe” — Tom Wolfe’s appellation in The Bonfire of the Vanities. But Reagan — to say nothing of Teddy Roosevelt in a previous time — would have never turned his inauguration into a tech quasi-IPO. Part of that was simply Trumpian grift. Paris was worth a Mass to Henry IV; Trump may have thought about that after visiting Notre Dame last month. Why not invite those who might use their time fruitfully to cut deals with Donald Jr.?
The “masters of the universe” were only financial titans, not cultural oligarchs who control not only commerce but information in a nation driven by its amusements, diversions and distractions.
Trump as the last boomer represents something of a return, albeit idiosyncratic, to the early boomer politics of the 1960s. Then, the boomers questioned the post-war order, its foreign policy internationalism and liberalized economic order. They questioned it from the left then, Trump now from the America First isolationist right.
Policy though is secondary to culture, and the boomers are primarily a cultural phenomenon. The recent death of Carter, last of the Greatest Generation, and the return of the boomerlock, is an illustrative contrast. Carter, Bush Sr. and their cohort actually made America great. The boomers talk about imitating them.
National Post