Ronald Reagan vs Donald Trump: the Gap is Smaller Than We Think
The 40th President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, was once a Hollywood B-movie actor. However, his performance as President of the United States was Oscar-worthy. The last CSPAN Presidential History Survey ranked Reagan as the 5th best U.S. president in public persuasion. If looking only at the presidents of the 20th and 21st centuries, he would be second only to Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), who, in that category, is considered the greatest of all time.
Reagan is the name most evoked when talking about what Republican presidents were like before the 45th President, Donald Trump. Certainly, in terms of general demeanor, Reagan and Trump are light-years apart. Reagan knew what was appropriate to say in public. (What he said in private is something we’ll get to later.) His feelings about immigration and the Hispanic community were also quite different. He appreciated Hispanic culture, and his immigration bill granted amnesty to nearly 3 million undocumented people.
Most of all, the idea of Reagan kowtowing to Russia in any way, shape, or form is unimaginable. Trump has taken the word of Russian leader (dictator) Vladimir Putin over America’s intelligence agencies and sided with Putin’s aggression against the democratic country of Ukraine. Even worse, the Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives continue to show more support for Putin and Russia by refusing to approve any financial aid or weapons packages for Ukraine. If Reagan were alive today to see that the Republican Party was in essence backing Russian attacks on the democracy of Ukraine, he’d have a heart attack.
Despite these clear differences, there are some striking similarities between Reagan and Trump, or at least between Reagan and Trump’s MAGA movement. Many of the things criticized about MAGA are ideas that Reagan championed. It would be fair to say that MAGA grew from some of the seeds planted by Reagan and the Conservative movement he was a leader of.
Some will be appalled at the idea of Reagan having anything in common with the MAGA crowd. Yet there are receipts to substantiate this. Here is some straightforward proof of how Reagan’s beliefs line up with MAGA ideology. It is found in a speech Reagan made when he was the governor of California. The speech, given at the first Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), helped set him up for his 1980 nomination as the GOP presidential candidate.
The First CPAC Conference and the Words of Ronald Reagan
Reagan was chosen to be the keynote speaker at CPAC’s first conference, which was in 1974. This speech differs from some of his previous ones, which were made for public consumption. In it, one can see the same Christian nationalism, anti-voting, and anti-democratic sentiments that are at the heart of today’s MAGA movement. In fact, on these subjects, the major difference between the words spouted by those in today’s GOP and Reagan’s speech is that of style, not substance.
The Highlights of Reagan’s 1974 CPAC Speech
- The Lack of Separation Between Church and State
The speech at CPAC would be the first time Reagan would mention “a shining city on a hill.” It would become a well-known Reagan metaphor in future speeches, one that framed America as a beacon of democracy for those seeking to escape Communism. However, the phrase comes from the words of Puritan pilgrim John Winthrop. In Reagan’s CPAC speech, he quotes the full passage and then makes a dig against the separation of church and state.
‘We will be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.’ Well, we have not dealt falsely with our God, even if He is temporarily suspended from the classroom.
2. Voting Rights and Voter Suppression
Here is Reagan voicing thoughts that question whether everyone should be allowed to vote.
We may never get around to explaining how citizens who are so gullible that they can be suckered into buying cereal or soap that they don’t need and would not be good for them, can at the same time be astute enough to choose representatives in government to which they would entrust the running of their lives.
You would think the disdain Reagan showed towards American citizens would have upset people. It’s an example of why Reagan was rightly called “The Great Communicator.” In this speech, he managed to say that the average American voter wasn’t intelligent enough to choose their representation without it coming off as being uppity or class-based. Of course, his entire speech was constructed to imply that those present were not the citizens he was talking about.
3. How U.S. History Should be Taught in Schools
“I must say to you who have recently or presently are still receiving an education, I am awed by your powers of resistance. I have some knowledge of the attempts that have been made in many classrooms and lecture halls to persuade you that there is little to admire in America.”
Today we have groups like “Moms of Liberty” and governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis pushing the idea that American history in our schools has gotten “too woke.” Instead, they want to deny the less savory details about America’s past by either erasing the fact that they happened or suggesting that they weren’t that bad. Reagan clearly would have agreed with this approach.
“Cartoonists with acid-tipped pens portray some of the reminders of our heritage and our destiny as old-fashioned. They say that we are trying to retreat into a past that actually never existed. Looking to the past in an effort to keep our country from repeating the errors of history is termed by them as “taking the country back to McKinley. (…)We are not a warlike people. Nor is our history filled with tales of aggressive adventures and imperialism, which might come as a shock to some of the placard painters in our modern demonstrations. ”
Reagan claimed that the desire to look to the past was to “keep the country from repeating the errors of history.” It’s clearly disingenuous. His sanitized version of U.S. history creates a country that has no past instances of “aggressive adventures and imperialism” by erasing parts of America’s past.
One of Reagan’s galling examples of this is when he claims the U.S. “freed” Cuba. It’s, at best, a half-truth. Yes, because of the Spanish-American War of 1898, Spain had to give up Cuba. However, here’s the opening part of the factual description of those events from the U.S. State Department.
After Spain’s defeat by U.S. and Cuban forces during the War of 1898, Spain relinquished sovereignty over Cuba. Following the war, U.S. forces occupied Cuba until 1902, when the United States allowed a new Cuban government to take full control of the state’s affairs. As a condition of independence, the United States forced Cuba to grant a continuing U.S. right to intervene on the island in accordance with the Platt Amendment.” (emphasis added)
The Platt Amendment continued until 1932, but American political involvement with Cuba continued until 1959. That is when the Communist Fidel Castro came into power. Officially, “the United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba in January 1961.”
Factually speaking, it wasn’t as if America “freeing” Cuba hadn’t created a decades-long military presence, wasn’t about protecting business interests, and did not result in the American takeover of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines. Indigenous Americans, Native Hawaiians, and the people of the Philippines would rightly disagree with Reagan’s assessment. The only thing missing from Reagan’s railing against facts being taught in America’s classrooms was the term “woke.”
4. Disapproval of American Youth and their attitudes regarding environmentalism, capitalism, and bodily autonomy
For the second time in this century, capitalism and the free enterprise are under assault. Privately owned business is blamed for spoiling the environment, exploiting the worker and seducing, if not outright raping, the customer. (…)Overwhelmingly, 65, 70, and 75 percent of the students found business responsible, as I have said before, for the things that were wrong in this country. That same number said that government was the solution and should take over the management and the control of private business. Eighty percent of the respondents said they wanted government to keep its paws out of their private lives.
If the poll hadn’t said that students felt the government should take over private businesses, would Reagan have been more accepting of the student movements? After all, that language does sound like communism. Of course, starting with Social Security way back in 1934, conservatives likened anything that was done on behalf of the American people to communism. They also conflate communism with socialism, which is not the same thing.
The speech doesn’t say what poll is being referenced. Therefore, we can’t know if the verbiage used by Reagan was from that poll or was his (or his speech writer’s) interpretation of what was said. What history does show is that conservatives from that time were very concerned about the anti-war and general counter-culture movements and their attacks on corporations.
“Political activists in the 1960s — from civil rights advocates to anti-war protesters to more radical and often violent groups such as the Weather Underground — viewed the business corporation as an integral part of the “establishment” that crippled dissent, promoted imperialism abroad and injustice at home, and stifled free expression.” (The Museum of American Finance)
One point made by these movements was that the “military-industrial complex” bore some responsibility for Vietnam and Korea. They also viewed corporations in general as having an “autocratic” and “dehumanizing” influence on U.S. culture and politics.
The lack of concern for workers & consumers was not new to the GOP, but the anti-environmentalism Reagan ushered in was. As noted by historian Christopher Sellers, Republican President Teddy Roosevelt created the National Park System, and President Richard Nixon started the Endangered Species List and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Another seemingly odd point is Reagan’s railing against the 80 percent that wanted the federal government out of their private lives. You would think this idea wouldn’t upset someone who believed the government shouldn’t interfere in private businesses, but no. Reagan and the Conservatives he addressed didn’t want individuals to have a right to privacy. They wanted businesses to be unregulated, but people to be watched and told what they could to do with their bodies — even if they were in their own homes.
It’s easy to think this attitude was only about Roe v. Wade, which had been decided the year before CPAC’s first convention. However, the Conservative uproar around women and sexual freedom had come to a head in 1965. (It was a banner year for freedom.) The case, Griswold v. Connecticut, established that individuals have a right to privacy for their personal choices in the home sphere. Specifically, it said that married people had the right to use birth control and to consult with their doctor on the matter. A later case in 1971 built upon that precedent to say everyone had the right. Then came Roe v. Wade, which also used the precedent of Griswold to establish the right for a woman to have an abortion.
All of these right-to-privacy laws infuriate Conservatives because they disrupt a Christian social order. It’s an order referred to often in the pre-Civil War era as a justification for slavery, but its implications also affect the role of women and people of the lower and middle classes. (For more on this, check out my piece on The Sharon Statement.)
The Issue of Big Government and “Entitlements”
“Government has grown in size, power and cost through the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society. It costs more for government today than a family pays for food, shelter and clothing combined. Not even the Office of Management and Budget knows how many boards, commissions, bureaus and agencies there are in the federal government, but the federal registry, listing their regulations, is just a few pages short of being as big as the Encyclopedia Britannica.”
Of course, all of the programs mentioned by Reagan are the ones that provide Americans with a social safety net. Now, here is the irony of Reagan’s speech. Even as he spoke against the “entitlements” being provided by the Federal Government to those less fortunate, he was rapturous about how much better things had gotten for the average American since the time of his birth (1911).
“When I was born my life expectancy was 10 years less than I have already lived — that’s a cause of regret for some people in California, I know. Ninety percent of Americans at that time lived beneath what is considered the poverty line today, and three-quarters lived in what is considered substandard housing. Today each of those figures is less than 10 percent. We have increased our life expectancy by wiping out, almost totally, diseases that still ravage mankind in other parts of the world. (…)We have distributed our wealth more widely among our people than any society known to man. Americans work less hours for a higher standard of living than any other people. Ninety-five percent of all our families have an adequate daily intake of nutrients — and a part of the five percent that don’t are trying to lose weight.”
Reagan’s words suggest he did not see the connection between the programs he complained about and the progress the nation had achieved as a whole. What could be an even worse possibility? Maybe Reagan did see the connections, and that was the unsaid problem he had with the Democrats. The Democrats had become the party that supported civil rights. Perhaps he didn’t want those benefits going to African Americans?
Reagan’s Racism Was a Black-and-White Issue
What Reagan espoused that day would become a part of the core beliefs of the Republican Party, and those same points have become the backbone of the MAGA movement. This may be difficult for some to take in because Reagan is usually seen as the symbol of the pre-MAGA Republican.
Yet, once upon a time, Reagan had been a Democrat, an F.D.R. fan, and supportive of the New Deal. In fact, during the 1940s and 1950s, he was pro-union and spoke up against the Klu Klux Klan. Yes, the man who fired all the union air-traffic controllers in 1981 was once pro-union.
The Reagan we think of today didn’t appear until the Civil Rights movement (marked by Brown v. Board of Education). This was when Reagan began to directly express his disenchantment with the government helping the poor and calling programs that helped them, including the New Deal, Marxist. He later would claim the Democratic Party had left him, but he’s the one who walked away.
Where did Reagan’s disillusion with the party come from? Well, as is often said about Trump, who can know what’s in a person’s heart? All we can do is look at what changed about the party during that time.
Although the “Red Scare” era of Joseph McCarthy officially ended, the Democratic Party was strongly anti-Communist (it still is) and still supported all of the things that had been a part of the New Deal that Reagan had once supported. The one major change to the Democratic Party was that its 1960 official political platform openly called for the “Economic Bill of Rights” that had been declared in F.D.R.’s New Deal to be applicable “for all Americans of whatever race, place of residence, or station in life.” This was too much for Reagan. He became a Republican in 1962. ( For the record, today, the Democratic Party is still anti-communist. ( A democratic socialist is not the same as a communist.)
Given his talk about “not wanting to repeat the errors of history,” one wonders how Reagan decided what should be considered errors. After all, he wasn’t completely oblivious to them. While he was president, Reagan signed a bill that made restitution to Japanese Americans for putting them in internment camps during World War II. He also managed to pass an immigration reform bill that included amnesty for undocumented immigrants.
When it came to people of African descent though, Reagan’s actions weren’t ones to be lauded. One can be against the KKK and still have a racist worldview. It was Reagan who campaigned on the racist trope of “the welfare queen,” and vetoed both the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 and sanctions against South Africa for the system of Apartheid. His argument for the latter was the equivalent of saying one should not punish plantation owners because they’ll be even harder on those enslaved. (Both of Reagan’s vetoes were overridden.) There’s also the recently unearthed 1971 recording of Reagan speaking with then-president Richard Nixon. Reagan called the delegates from Africa “monkeys” and said, “They look uncomfortable wearing shoes.” It’s the kind of thing one would expect a Confederate, KKK member, or “Dixiecrat” to say. Of course, by this time, Reagan had been a Conservative Republican for nearly ten years.
Why We Need to Get Honest About Reagan
Racism, like antisemitism, is the poison pill that can turn the most reasonable people into monsters. Reagan, a staunch anti-communist champion, truly loved democracy — in theory. It was his innate racism (which, at the time, was mainly heard in dog whistles) that led him to the Republican Party. As discussed in the Sharon Statement, it was racism that drove the organization of the 1960s Conservative movement, and that movement then came to overtake the GOP.
For Reagan and these GOP Conservatives, the youth movements in the 1960s and early 1970s expressed the opposite of their belief that businesses have the right to make as much profit as possible, even at the expense of the American people. This prioritizing of corporate rights over human rights was especially apparent in Reagan’s disdain for protecting workers, consumers, and the environment. (This is also tied into racism, but that’s a much longer discussion.)
Reagan’s speech at CPAC is important because it shows these ideas have long been at the party’s core. His words give us a different narrative than the one currently being pushed — which says the current state of the Republican Party and its politicians is a recent development brought on by Trump.
It was the Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who blocked President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, not Trump. Yet, because the turning over of Roe v Wade has been a disaster for both the country and the Republican party, some of the same Republicans who backed the idea for decades are now disavowing abortion bans. Yet, it is the Republican President George H. W. Bush who nominated Judge Clarence Thomas, a man with little judicial experience, to the Supreme Court. This happened only after Reagan failed to get Judge Robert Bork, a man whose many years of experience showed him to be a Conservative anti-abortion idealogue, onto the Supreme Court.
In other words, some Republicans may now despise Trump, but they were happy to use him and his followers to carry out their agenda. They courted the evangelical crowd for decades. Remember Jerry Farwell and the so-called, “Moral Majority”? That was back in the 1970s and 1980s. These are the same kinds of voters who back Trump now. MAGA didn’t just come out of the blue. The GOP cultivated its beginnings decades ago — and Ronald Reagan was their poster boy.
Granted, Reagan was obviously more civil, mannered, and eloquent in his demeanor. However, he was also the one who was willing to flout our democracy in the name of saving another one. The Iran-Contra Affair tends to be glossed over when discussing Reagan. Yet, being that Reagan thought it was okay to violate Constitutional law and secretly go around Congress, why is it surprising that Trump sees no problem with breaking Constitutional law as well? Until the GOP comes to terms with their part in creating Trump’s MAGA movement, getting rid of Trump will not stop those who want to topple American democracy.
