King Trump On Rye
History repeats when you are not looking
Rob Reiner died. You may not know it but I believe we are reliving the moments before the 1987 crash (which maybe 1 reader of mine remembers) and connects Donald Trump and his two favorite artists: Stephen King and Rob Reiner.
But, first, I’m sad. Rob Reiner didn’t die as he was supposed to and may he find peace along with his wife many years.
All over social media they were asking what is your favorite Rob Reiner movie? Only one came to mind:
Stand By Me
I grew up renting VHS tapes from a little convenience store on a hill near my house.
It was known as Stop-N-Go.
Candy, soda, movies.
The kind of place you assume will always be there simply because it was there yesterday.
We’d walk up as kids, argue over what to rent, and walk home holding the tape like it mattered.
Because it did.
(Like Tom Cruise in Top Gun and now Top Gun 2, I’m older but he never aged. I should have been a Scientologist)
One day, the guy who ran the place was murdered and stuffed into the freezer.
The store never reopened.
No slow fade.
No explanation.
Just gone.
That was my Stand by Me moment.
Except we didn’t go looking for a body.
It showed up and told us something about the world instead.
What stuck with me wasn’t the shock.
It was the lesson.
Things you think are stable can disappear overnight.
That lesson shows up later in life.
Especially in markets.
1986 was a strange year.
A calm before speed.
That was the year Stand by Me came out.
Rob Reiner beginning his legendary run from 1986 to 1992.
(Stand By Me, Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men)
Stand By Me is a movie about boys learning that adults aren’t coming to save them.
That friendship matters.
That innocence ends quietly, not ceremoniously.
Reiner had another hit movie right before the market crash in 1987 and told a classic fairy tale, The Princess Bride.
Most people don’t remember it.
October 19, 1987.
The market dropped more than twenty percent in a single day.
No war.
No scandal.
No villain.
But there was manipulation of the US Dollar that began in 1985 with the Plaza Accord and ended the with the Louvre Accord in 1987
Models failed.
Humans froze.
And then, almost as quickly as it broke, it stabilized.
1987 didn’t teach people about valuation.
It taught them about story.
A story, a narrative, a zeitgeist occurs before the damage happens and before explanations arrive.
That’s why 1987 still matters. Because the biggest players are still in the news.
We are in Act 3 of the movie.
Just after the 1987 stock market crash, two books were released in November.
Stephen King had the number-one book in America with The Tommyknockers.
Talk about being a Futurist, King’s book is about…2025:
A story about buried power waking up.
Technology infecting a town.
Intelligence outrunning wisdom.
Just below it on the bestseller list sat The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump
A book about leverage, confidence, and surviving by narrative when reality starts to bend.
1988
The top selling books were by King and Trump and the big box office was by Reiner.
Coincidence? Maybe.
What ties them together isn’t spectacle.
It’s the mundane.
Maybe our life is mundane and they are good, still, at capturing who we are and what we need:
Kids on bikes.
A routine day.
A small slight.
A zoning issue.
A normal life.
King turns the mundane into fear by asking what happens when ordinary life can’t protect you anymore. (Hey, even Stranger Things is ended on Netflix now)
For Reiner, with his art, he turns meaning by paying attention to moments most people rush past.
Trump turns it into leverage by inflating scale and attention.
Different ethics.
Same instinct.
They understood you don’t start with drama.
You start with what people already recognize.
Then you change how it feels.
Rob Reiner made Stand by Me before at the beginning of his success.
Later he made Misery, another King masterpiece to help bookend his phenomenal run.
It’s a movie about being trapped by your own success.
About obsession.
About what happens when control replaces curiosity.
(notice the headline of the Misery movie right next to Trump)
The year 1990 the market crashed and the US entered Iraq.
Stephen King felt the danger from the inside.
The Tommyknockers and Maximum Overdrive came from a period he later admitted was fueled by addiction and excess.
(Talk about coincidence the “mundane” and “normal” King directed his worse movie with Marla Maples, who became Trump’s second wife)
Too much power.
Too little restraint.
Then he stopped.
He got sober.
Admitted failure.
Wrote On Writing.
Finished The Dark Tower.
He didn’t reinvent the brand.
He recommitted to the craft.
Donald Trump adapted differently.
His real estate myth peaked in the eighties.
Cracked in the nineties.
So he migrated platforms.
Tabloids.
Television.
Politics.
He didn’t deepen.
He repackaged.
That’s not a moral judgment.
It’s evolution.
There’s one more overlap from that era that still makes me smile.
Seinfeld was produced by Rob Reiner’s company.
A show famously called “about nothing,” though that was never really true.
It was about how, when meaning thins out, small things become enormous.
A parking spot becomes destiny.
Soup becomes doctrine.
The show ends its run in the middle of 1998 right before the last crash before the big one in 2000.
Years later, Steve Bannon, Trump’s advisor, ends up receiving residuals from Seinfeld.
Not a conspiracy. Just overlap.
In 1999 at the top of the epic stock market boom, Stephen King going on a stroll gets hit by a car (I can relate).
So to summarize so far if you have fallen asleep:
*1986 where Trump, King, Reiner were the tops in American culture and the year after the 1987 market crash. Reiner wins accolade for Misery then the market crashes in 1990.
*Seinfeld, and basically peak Reiner, finished in 1998 and market sells off
*1999, King get hits by a car, and market crashes.
Culture, media, power, and attention bleeding into each other without a referee.
If Trump’s political career sometimes feels like a show about nothing, it’s not because nothing is happening.
It’s because attention has replaced proportion.
The mundane, amplified.
My impression is that from these rhythms we are going to see some type of vicious and quick sell off this coming year. I’m going to try to flesh it out, but when I see our shared culture with these similarities I would like to consider if this is coincidence, or something more…
These type of ideas I am sharing is not to pin point a specific time but to alert you like your hand if its in boiling water, or you are stuck in the cold.
The temperature is changing so be prepared.
Stand by Me wasn’t about finding a body.
It was about learning to walk when the world stops making promises.
1987 wasn’t about a crash.
It was about policies concerning the most fundamental asset in the world
US Dollars
Most people forgot it happened. And the ones that do probably don’t know the reason why.
History doesn’t repeat but it certainly can rhyme
Eric
Today, for paid subscribers I share a stock that does advertising in a niche that used to be popular and now making 52 week highs
