According to Frank Lavin in “National Review,” Donald Trump was no Ronald Reagan. But if Reagan had been forced to deal with frequent attacks and calls for assaults from adversaries like Trump’s, wouldn’t his approval rating and his temper have taken a hit too?
National Review has found yet another reason to hate Trump, whom it has attacked relentlessly for over four years. It seems that among his multiple shortcomings, according to Frank Lavin, a supporter of Republican Voters Against Trump in 2020, Donald Trump was not the Gipper. In fact, he caused the Republican Party to deviate grievously from Reagan’s policies; and so it now behooves us to save the GOP by returning to the proven “conservative” teachings of the president whose approval ratings approached 70 percent shortly after leaving office.
Lavin offers a study in contrast between the Gipper and Trump. In most ways (except in his tax-slashing and deregulation policies), Trump dragged the GOP away from the firm foundations that Reagan bequeathed to his followers. For example, Reagan had “values,” while presumably the Donald has none that we can praise. While Reagan stressed cooperation with the opposite party, Trump was always at war with the Dems. Or as Lavin tells it: “Reagan occasionally found support from Speaker Tip O’Neill. Trump ended up with nothing from Speaker Pelosi.” The contrast continues with Lavin noting: “Reagan set the stage for NAFTA with his call for a ‘North American Accord.’ Trump sided with Bernie Sanders in withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.”
Allow me to point out that Trump did not scuttle the idea of trade deals with Canada and Mexico. He renegotiated them in a way advantageous to the American working class. He also renegotiated those parts of the TPP that he found helpful to the American work force, although pace Lavin and National Review, I don’t recall Bernie Sanders leaping to Trump’s defense.
In another National Review piece, this time by Alexander William Salter, I admit to being bewildered by this passage: “It’s true that some of the Trump administration’s policies, notably on immigration and international trade, were deviations from conservative orthodoxy, but these were hardly successes.” Was the “conservative orthodoxy” to which we should be returning the absence of border walls? And how was Trump unsuccessful if he stopped the flow of illegals into the U.S., even in the face of massive opposition from the Democrats and from members of his own party?
Was Reagan’s amnesty in 1986 something that Trump should have imitated? I can’t imagine why. The only beneficiaries were the corporate interests that gained cheap labor, and the public sector that issued welfare checks to unemployed Americans. That amnesty did nothing to relieve the continuing problem of illegal immigration, and Reagan later spoke of it as “the biggest regret” of his life.
Returning to Lavin’s piece, it’s important to realize that he ignores a changing historical context. In the 1980s, the Democratic Party of Tip O’Neill bore little resemblance to the party that Trump had to confront as his relentless enemy. Back then Democrats were still a party of blue-collar workers (a class that Trump tried to bring into his populist movement). Tip O’Neill was an Irish Catholic ward-heeler from Boston, who represented a working-class base; Nancy Pelosi by contrast speaks for culturally radical San Franciscans in a transformed Democratic Party, which today features LGBTQ demands, anti-white hysteria, Green New Deals, and which fights the gender identity war. Why would anyone think that Trump would not have gotten along with Tip as well as Ronnie did; or that Reagan would have enjoyed a better relationship with the present Democratic Party than Trump has? We are speaking about different forces of opposition to the GOP in two different eras.
Although Reagan faced critics in the leftist media, as someone who briefly served in his administration, let me assure Mr. Lavin that this sniping was nothing like the nonstop, venomous attacks to which Trump was subjected from the moment he declared his candidacy for the presidency. I have no idea how anyone but an absolute saint would not have exploded in the face of such slander; and it was directed not only against the president but also against his wife and young son. Never in my long life have I seen such a feeding frenzy.
Attacks on Trump as another Hitler and calls for assaults on him became commonplace over the last four years; and I strongly suspect that if Reagan had been forced to deal with such adversaries his approval rating and his temper would both have taken a hit. Reagan left office with a 63 percent approval rating, which by 1989 went up to 68 percent. We might ask what that approval rating would have been if the media threw dirt at him incessantly and if his congressional opponents incited riots against him throughout his presidency. Please note these attacks occurred not just because the Donald was intemperate in his language. The Left wanted power, and it was necessary to destroy Trump’s presidency to achieve it.
Finally, I would note that, unlike Reagan, Trump tried to be a transformative president who took his own party kicking and screaming into the populist form that he gave it. Although an honest, dedicated leader, Reagan transformed nothing. He also ended up turning foreign policy and much else over to the neoconservatives, who hang around like the political equivalent of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Republished with gracious permission from Intellectual Takeout (January 2021).
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Thank you for this piece. I believe it will become increasingly (if that’s mathematically possible) important to parse out the truth in regard to the 45th president of the United States’ record for just the reason you uncover. There is incredible revisionism when it comes to his record as Establishmentarians, Republican and Democrat alike, badly desire to erase this president from the record altogether and, if that is impossible, they desire to miscategorize his triumphs as losses, his strengths as weaknesses. Even for those who took issue with his tone or approach would do well, I think, to call everyone to the truth, to a fair review of the facts, a clear look at history. For our entire cultural memory and therefore our future trajectory rely on it. We cannot live by lies, to borrow a quote the great Solzhenitsyn, and expect to remain free and good.
Reagan was a very congenial man, but the press still tried to demonize him by calling him a dunce, falling asleep at meetings, and a jelly bean eater. He was very effective at deflecting with his congeniality…. None of these come close to the vilification that President Trump had to endure, and still does, despite his being out of office. The attacks were vicious, mean, and a determined attempt to undermine him. He was an outsider, and how dare he insert himself into their cozy money and power grubbing “deep state” world. He had to be an example to any other pretenders to not even think about trying to run or we will destroy you as we did him. Should he have laid down and taken it? I think not. His combativeness, his willingness to engage and fight back is an American tradition going back to the revolution. Would you expect less from a kid raised in the Queens? Impeachment is a joke, and a not so subtle attempt to prevent him from running in 2024. God bless him for trying to change things.
There were Nazi allusions made against Reagan. As many as against Trump? Maybe not, but there is more media now. This has been a common thing used against conservatives since Harry Truman said that Thomas Dewey, who wasn’t very conservative, was supported by the same kind of people who had supported the Nazis. I do not remotely suggest that the attacks on Trump were not regularly beyond the bounds of any semblance of decency, but his ahistorical whining that no one ever faced the kinds of attacks he did many have been his least attractive feature. Did anything that was thrown at Trump compare to Daniel Schorr’s CBS reported that after the 1964 Republican Convention, Barry Goldwater was going to make a trip to Bavaria to link up with right-wing elements there? I think not.
I remember Rush Limbaugh saying early in the Trump Administration that the president had told him that he was surprised by the ferocity of the attacks against him. Only a man totally unaware of recent American history could have been surprised at that. The Left didn’t become vicious for the first time in 2017. Trump knew very little of the country he hoped to govern. And he had no idea of how the things he said — such as the comments about Mexicans in his original announcement — sounded to people who did not think the way he did. If he had, the Left’s ferocity in opposing him would not at all have come as a surprise.
Perhaps the biggest difference between Reagan and Trump is that Reagan was an actor, and the part of President was just another role for him. He served in the way that he thought people expected a President to act, and because he read the public’s expectations well, people were satisfied with his portrayal of a President. Trump was hardly an actor at all; I don’t think there is a “real Trump” behind the bluster. With Trump, “what you see is what you get.” Beyond that, by the time he became President, Reagan had already served as governor of California and was an experienced politician. Trump walked into the Oval Office without a day of governing experience, and the Presidency of the United States is just not a “learn while you earn” sort of position. Unfortunately, as preferable as another four years of Trump would have been even to four minutes of a Biden administration, Trump suffered from many shortcomings that I hope don’t afflict the next Republican candidate for President– because a real Republican statesman could beat the likes of Biden and Harris in a landslide.