It has become commonplace to suggest that, whatever policy positions or leadership priorities he’s pursuing at any given moment, Donald Trump possesses no overarching political ideology of his own. His administration, the thinking goes, is fashioned around his volatile temperament and his ever-shifting array of advisers. His beliefs are as fleeting as his late-night tweets, and as subject to sudden shifts in direction.

But decades before Twitter existed, Trump was spending his not-so-hard-earned money to promote a range of strong—and surprisingly consistent—political positions. In September 1987, he shelled out $94,801 to buy full-page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. Addressed “to the American People,” the ad harshly depicted the nation’s so-called allies as deadbeats and freeloaders. “Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend as allies,” Trump demanded. “Let’s help our farmers, our sick, our homeless … end our huge deficits, reduce our taxes, and let America’s economy grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defense of their freedom.” He concluded with a rhetorical flourish that foreshadowed his now-famous campaign slogan: “Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.”

A salient detail about the ad—besides the way it perfectly aligns with Trump’s current screw-you stance toward NATO—is that it actually hurt Trump’s bottom line. “Japanese wealth was a key to the marketing of his luxury condominiums and his casinos in Atlantic City,” John O’Donnell, the former president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, writes in his tell-all memoir, Trumped! “The damage to our efforts to promote Trump Plaza in the Far East was incalculable.” Trump, it would seem, cared more about promoting his political opinions than protecting his bank account.

Two years later, Trump again paid tens of thousands of dollars to make his knee-jerk opinions more widely known, this time weighing in on the infamous Central Park jogger case with a call to “bring back the death penalty” for its five suspects. (Despite the eventual exoneration of all five young men—four black, one Latino—after the real attacker belatedly confessed, Trump remains convinced they were guilty.) “What has happened to law and order,” Trump asked in his rambling, emotional ad, “to the neighborhood cop we all trusted to safeguard our homes and families, the cop who had the power under the law to help us in times of danger, keep us safe from those who would prey on innocent lives to fulfill some distorted inner need.” There was no question mark. But here, too, Trump suggested that America was being “laughed at”—this time by domestic foes.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from these seminal moments in the evolutionary prehistory of @realDonaldTrump, it’s that the president does, in fact, have a relatively constant and unswerving matrix of political beliefs. His ideology combines a distaste for multilateral constraints on American military and economic might with a stark vision of a white-majority social order in near-terminal decline. Trump has not only held these convictions for decades, he is deeply passionate about them. And perhaps most disconcertingly, he shares them with Steve Bannon, his White House chief strategist and an apostle of authoritarian political disruption for its own sake.