Gordon Gekko of Wall Street would be a popular choice of liberals for the 1980s movie character who best illuminated the supposedly ugly truth about the Reagan era, but he’s not Andrew O’Hehir’s choice. In a Monday analysis of the films of the late Wes Craven, O'Hehir stated that Freddy Krueger, from Craven’s 1984 movie A Nightmare on Elm Street, was “the most potent pop-culture signifier of the Reagan years.”

In his standup-comedy days, Steve Martin did a joke about imposing the death penalty for parking violations. Michael Tomasky suggests that the House Benghazi committee has a similarly disproportionate penalty in mind for Hillary Clinton over Emailgate: wrecking her presidential campaign.

Tomasky acknowledged in a Wednesday column that Hillary “screwed up this email business,” but asserted that the committee “isn’t even pretending to be about the Benghazi attacks anymore. It’s a taxpayer-funded get Clinton operation, and it’s now all about finding a smoking gun in these emails.”

In March 2013, the Republican National Committee released what soon became known as the “autopsy report,” which looked at how the GOP might reverse trends that recently had caused the party to lose the popular vote for the fifth time in six presidential elections. Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman believes that conservatives’ hostile response to the report’s big-tent ideas paved the way for the disruptive candidacy of Donald Trump.

“This was all supposed to turn on a dime when the presidential election started,” wrote Longman in a Tuesday post. “All this hate and resentment and bigotry was supposed to just get turned off and Jeb Bush would waltz in with his sunny Reaganesque nobility and his love of amnesty and Common Core and his Mexican wife and family…and the hive would settle down and get back driving around that ideological cul-de-sac like good little stormtroopers. But these aren’t good little stormtroopers. These are genuine ruffians. And they’re having a block party and they’ve got their own music provided by Donald Trump.”

The Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor famously and emphatically rejected the idea that the host used in the Communion rite is a mere symbol. Gun owners might have a similarly negative response to Adam Gopnik’s claim that guns “have an almost entirely symbolic function.”

“No lives are saved, and no intruders are repelled [by the use of guns]; the dense and hysterical mythology of gun love has been refuted again and again,” declared Gopnik in a Friday post dealing in part with this week’s murder of two TV journalists near Roanoke, Va. “The few useful social functions that guns do have—in hunting or in killing varmints, as a rural man such as my father has to do—can be preserved even with tight regulations, as in Canada.”

Democrats typically argue that almost all of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s mistakes have been molehills that Republicans have done their best to make into mountains. Heather Digby Parton thinks that the GOP has been aided in that regard by the mainstream media.

“One of the major effects of the patented ‘Clinton Scandal’ that’s become a fixture of political conversation over the past two decades is the helplessness in engenders in Democrats,” wrote Parton in a Monday piece. “They know it’s not a real scandal, and yet the press is blatantly aroused by the opportunity to speculate wildly about ‘what it all means’ while the Republicans smugly repeat their talking points with robotic military precision.”

Although the term “anchor baby” has been around for only a couple of decades, the concept is several centuries old, believes Chauncey DeVega. In a Friday article, DeVega contended that the earliest American anchor babies were born to colonists, and that the modern term “cannot possibly be separated from the nightmare of white supremacy, of a democracy where human rights and citizenship were based on a person’s melanin count and parentage.”

DeVega further argued that a much broader racial agenda is at work: “Movement conservatives’ eager deployment of the ‘anchor baby’ meme — and their solution of revoking birthright citizenship through a rewrite of the Constitution– is in keeping with the Republican Party’s assault on the won-in-blood freedom of black and brown Americans. The ‘anchor baby’ talking point is yet more proof that the GOP is a radical and destructive political force, one that actively embraces white supremacy.”

It’s a matter of political record that since at least 2009, Republicans have talked at length about health-care reform, especially alternatives to Obamacare. Apparently almost all of them were, as Jon Lovitz’s Master Thespian would put it, “Acting!” That’s essentially what The Week's Paul Waldman alleged in a Wednesday post.

“Republicans have faced a real health care problem for many years now, which is that health care just isn't their thing,” asserted Waldman. “It's one of those ‘mommy’ issues that liberals care about, while conservatives are much more likely to be interested in topics like tax policy or national defense. Yet throughout the Obama years, they've had to act like they both care about and understand the substance of this issue.”

In the late 1980s, the Bears (a briefly great band, not the football team) pointed out, “This world hangs by a slender thread/Trust.” Daily Beast columnist and MSNBC pundit Alter argued Monday that Hillary Clinton’s current political malaise is rooted in her failure to trust the American people rather than in any real wrongdoing on her part.

“Hillary’s problem is not the emails story itself, but her response to it, which has been halting and defensive,” declared Alter. “The reason so many voters don’t trust Hillary is she doesn’t trust them. Trust is reciprocal. If she trusted the public more, she would be mixing it up in the media more, like [Donald] Trump, and betting that the public will eventually sort out the truth.”

There’s going to be a Top Gun sequel, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous is coming back, and Bloom County has already returned. Still, suggests Esquire's Pierce, when it comes to things that have the 1980s written all over them, these days Donald Trump is the king of the mountain.

In a Tuesday post, Pierce contended that Trump “was one of the purest products of the Age of Reagan, which was nothing if not a celebration of vulgar excess, whether that was illustrated by the excessive opulence of people like Trump or the excessive self-regard of the mindless nationalistic chest-beating that kept Reagan's administration aloft through scandal after scandal. In that time, the country was louder and more stupid than it had been for a very long time.”