I read that Trump is surprised and angered by Fox News’ running adverts that are not supportive of him. Here’s a quotation from the story on HuffPost: “What good is it if FOX News speaks well of me when they continually allow horrible and untruthful anti-Trump commercials to be run — and plenty of them,” Trump said in a statement. “In the good old days, that would never have happened and today it happens all of the time.” 

Trump should have realized that FOX News is not about Donald Trump, but about making money and doing whatever is necessary to make it. But what struck me most about Trump’s thunderbolt was “In the good old days, that would never have happened ….” 

To what “good old days” is he referring? Stalin’s U.S.S.R., Hitler’s Third Reich, Mussolini’s New Rome? In those regimes nothing whatever could be published that was insufficiently supportive or, heaven forbid, actually critical of the absolute rulers of these regimes.

Trump often speaks of the “good old days” with no specificity at all when addressing his believers. I believe it then means something like “when we ran things,” “when we were in charge,” “when they knew their place,” and so on. But I think that in this case, by “good old days” he means an imagined time in the past or in the future when the Dictator always had his way.