The party struggles to conserve what’s best about it.
The party struggles to conserve what’s best about it.
I n the nascent weeks of the 2024 Republican presidential primary, former president Donald Trump has taken to suggesting his (all but announced) main competitor, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, “grooms” high-school girls. He’s deployed his usual sort of crude nicknames, calling DeSantis “Tiny D” and “Meatball Ron.” He suggested that the governor would be working at a Pizza Hut if not for his endorsement.
But now, Trump’s surrogates are firing off insults more likely to cause DeSantis irreparable harm in a GOP primary. They are accusing the governor of once being a “Reagan Republican.”
As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously quipped upon hearing that James Buckley, the senator whose seat Moynihan was running for, was repeatedly referring to him as “Professor” Moynihan, “Ah, the mudslinging has begun.”
Trump World’s latest insult contradicts the starry-eyed pleadings on behalf of the Reagan legacy by people like the tax-reform advocate Grover Norquist: “Reaganism” in the Republican Party is as dead as Trump University’s chances in the NCAA basketball tournament. These days, the chances of seeing a genuine Reagan Republican running for president are roughly the same as bumping into Chris Rock at Will Smith’s next birthday party.
Eight years ago, the GOP had a choice: It could have embraced a Reagan-style optimism that sees small government and individual freedom as the way to carry America’s greatness forward. But instead, it got behind a singularly unfit candidate who has transformed the party into little more than a suicide cult centered on his buffoonery.
Nonetheless, there are those who believe Reagan Republicanism still exists within the 2024 GOP presidential field.
“I’m for a Reagan 2.0 candidate,” former speaker of the House Paul Ryan told Charlie Sykes on a recent podcast. “I want to see a Reagan 2.0 type of movement. I hate hearkening back to the past, but I think that was such a principled, philosophically grounded movement,” said Ryan.
Ryan deserves credit for speaking out against Trump, even though he endorsed him in 2016. But the problem with his formulation is that there isn’t any evidence the party would accept even a Reagan 1.0. Reagan’s philosophy of small-government conservatism, reduced regulation, a muscular approach to Russia, and expanded legal immigration would likely relegate him, if he were around today, to the land of single-digit candidates running because they want to juice their future speaking fees.
In virtually every case, the supposed “Reagan 2.0” candidates running in 2024 capitulated to Trump’s bullying both during and after his tenure as president. They are forever tainted by their association with him. Each one has been exposed as a principle-free coward interested more in holding power than in demanding a president demonstrate a Reagan-style dignity.
And yet some will still claim to be Reagan Republicans. In the words of honorary-doctorate holder Greta Thunberg, how dare you.
Since 2015, there have been a dozen off-ramps GOP electeds could have taken to get away from Trumpism. Only a handful of them took those routes, and aside from Mitt Romney, the party and its voters told them to keep on driving until they were out of Congress.
And if you were a national politician who believed you could straddle the line between Trumpism and Reaganism, you were deluding yourself.
Reagan emerged as a serious presidential candidate as a response to the deep malaise of the Jimmy Carter administration. People often think the Californian’s preternatural communication skills were due to his years as an actor, but this is an overstatement. Reagan was able to convey his optimism for the nation because he actually believed it. And he always credited regular Americans for making the nation great, never himself.
As historian H. W. Brands has noted, Reagan “believed what Americans have always wanted to believe about their country, and he made them believe it too.”
Reagan’s famous “Morning in America” ad didn’t air until 1984, when he was running for his second term, but it codified what the nation was feeling at the time. He was rewarded with an electoral victory — carrying 49 states — the likes of which the nation may never see again.
Trump, on the other hand, brought a grim vision of a country that had to be made great again, positing himself as the singular savior who could do it. In his dour inaugural address, he cited the “American carnage” he planned to fix. (He didn’t just pull the thread of Carter’s malaise, he ripped it to shreds.) Instead, he delivered chaos, misinformation, cruelty, election denialism, and ultimately an insurrection.
As they did with Carter, the voters recognized Trump’s failure, sending him on his way after one term. Yet a sizeable portion of the party thinks riding the Trump anvil to the bottom of the ravine, Wile E. Coyote–style, is the way forward.
Trump’s presidency was marred by the constant backrubs he performed on Russian president Vladimir Putin. Trump is now all but taking Russia’s side after Putin’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, and he could bring other Republicans like Meatball Ron along with him. (Nikki Haley, of course, criticized “some on the right” — she was looking at you, DeSantis — for calling the war a mere “territorial dispute,” but she hasn’t called out Trump, her former boss, for his stance.)
When Reagan, having only served as a governor, first ran for president, he was criticized for his lack of foreign-policy experience. But he knew enough to understand the Soviets’ lethal intentions, and repeatedly warned the world of them. Reagan grew into his role as leader of the West, staring down the world’s greatest threat and eventually winning the Cold War. Through intuition alone, he could see what few in the international community understood — that defense could be used as a weapon.
Carter, on the other hand, frequently underestimated the Kremlin. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 offered a sobering corrective, prompting him to say, “The action of the Soviets has made a more dramatic change in my opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are than anything they’ve done in the previous time that I’ve been in office.”
Even Jimmy Carter eventually saw what Trump still cannot. If Trump returned to the White House, it’s unlikely he’d stand up to Russia the way Reagan did. He seems perfectly comfortable continuing to be an admirer of Putin the strongman.
If Reagan’s titanium spine in dealing with Russia didn’t get him booted from Trump’s GOP, his enthusiasm for expanded legal immigration surely would. Trump focused on illegals coming across the southern border, launching his campaign by trying to scare Americans about invading criminals. Reagan focused on immigration as a source of potential business-owners and taxpayers.
“The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society,” Reagan said upon signing legislation that eased immigration restrictions. “Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans.”
With that attitude, Reagan would have pulled Beto O’Rourkian numbers in a modern Republican primary.
Of course, none of this even takes into account the personal style of the two men. Reagan fought his detractors with a smile, often sitting at his desk and writing out quips with which to burn Democrats, liberals, and the media. (“Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”)
Conversely, Trump sits at his compound in Mar-a-Lago firing off deranged all-caps screeds, inventing enemies whom he can then insult with racist nicknames or tell to go back to where they came from. During presidential debates, Reagan diced his opponents with savage one-liners. Trump bragged about the size of his crank.
Oh, and Reagan never worked up his supporters to the point where they wanted to hang the vice president in an effort to overturn the results of an election. There is that small difference.
If you are a politician who enabled Trump during his nearly eight years in politics, you have forever forfeited your claim to being a “Reagan Republican.” His disqualifying flaws were known to every GOP politician from the start. And every time a road had to be chosen between Trumpism and Reaganism, virtually every elected Republican veered toward MAGA.
No member of Congress who voted against impeaching Trump after he sicced his supporters on the Capitol should ever be trusted again. As Trump’s social-media posts get more deranged and unintelligible, it makes the votes to retain his good standing in the Grand Old Party even more unforgivable.
Modern Republicans may still revere Reagan, and a return to his optimistic free-marketism should be welcome to traditional conservatives. As Charles C. W. Cooke has noted, the party’s members have to pick Trump or conservatism — there is no middle ground.
But the party cannot move forward until it shakes free of the sitting Trump sycophants who sacrificed their dignity for ephemeral power. They, like Trump, stand for nothing but themselves.