Henry Olsen writes that “Trump’s election does not represent the de-Reaganization of the Republican Party; it presents Republicans with their last, best hope to re-Reaganize it.” We misunderstand Trump’s relation to Reaganism, in Olsen’s view, because we wrongly take Reagan to have been “an anti-government ideologue.”
Olsen is right to challenge the oversimplification of Reagan’s views and record. But I think he understates the difference between Reagan and Trump on one point: trade policy. Olsen writes that Reagan “imposed sanctions on Japanese industries and companies for what he believed were unfair trade practices even as he sought to extend free-trade agreements throughout the world. . . . [Trump’s] belief that free trade should be fair trade was Reagan’s.”
It’s true that Reagan did not govern as a free-trade purist. But the bipartisan postwar free-trading tradition was never purist. Presidents in both parties supported protectionism in particular instances while working to liberalize trade overall. In some cases, they saw supporting piecemeal protectionism as a way of advancing wholesale free trade. The George W. Bush administration slapped temporary tariffs on imported steel, for example, in order to buy congressional support for legislation to give the president the authority to negotiate trade deals.
Reagan’s record fits squarely into that tradition. President Trump’s views do not. At most he pays lip service to the idea of liberalizing trade generally, and he opposes multilateral free-trade deals. He wants to rip up existing trade deals, including one (NAFTA) that had its origins in the Reagan administration. He talks about leaving the World Trade Organization; Reagan never made similar comments about its precursor. Reagan vetoed several protectionist measures. Trump shows no sign of being willing to do the same. Presidents were more enthusiastic about free trade than Congress from the 1930s up until, well, a couple of weeks ago.
You can like or dislike the break Trump is trying to make in U.S. trade policy, but it’s a mistake to deny it. And I will cite one final authority on this question: Trump himself, who said just last month that he did not like Reagan’s record on trade and that it was one of his primary differences with the fortieth president.