Reasons Why Trump Is A Descendant of Reagan

I saw news this week that the Reagan Foundation, which manages the Gipper's library, has requested that the Trump campaign stop using Reagan in its fundraising materials. It's hard to tell how of this is the usual guarding of a dead public figure's image when the people in control of it don't profit, and how much of it is rooted in genuine dislike of Trump. In any case, the issue is a good time to remember that Donald Trump is very much part of Reagan's legacy.

It's important to see this, since there are many centrists who look back to the past and want to believe that Trump is some kind of aberration. Instead, he should be seen as the culmination of the path the Republican Party and conservative movement have taken in the last sixty years. Reagan, the most revered figure in the party and the movement, is a big part of this story.

To start with the obvious, Trump has lifted Reagan's 1980 campaign slogan "Let's Make America Again" and taken one word off. The similarities go beyond that, however. Here's a short but sweet list of examples:

• In Reagan's famous 1964 speech for Barry Goldwater, "A Time For Choosing," he equated the Great Society with communism, the kind of base level red scarefear mongering that Trump and the Republicans do today. He also dismissed statistics about Americans going hungry by saying "they were on a diet." That "joke" showed the downright mean and nasty side to his personality beneath all the sunny smiles. 

• Immediately after getting elected in governor 1966 Reagan sought to repeal the Rumford Fair Housing Act, a law that prohibited housing discrimination in California. National bans on discrimination would not be in place until 1968. Reagan claimed he was only defending property rights. Trump's recent Twitter diatribes about the suburbs being banned due to housing integration if Biden gets elected fall firmly into the same tradition. 

• When MLK was assassinated in 1968, Reagan responded by calling King's death "great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they'd break." He basically said King brought it on himself. It's the kind of trollish, mean-spirited response to someone's death I could totally hear coming from Trump's mouth. As president Reagan dragged his feet on establishing Martin Luther King Jr Day. Even as he passed the bill, he wrote to a John Birch conservative that the holiday's support was based "on an image, not reality." What was this "reality"? I assume that Reagan followed Bircher logic and assumed King was a communist. The same article I linked to shows that Reagan refused to say whether he thought King was a communist or not. 

• In 1976 while making a run for the presidency, Reagan paid to make a half-hour speech on television. During that speech he excoriated affirmative action, claiming that it was "reverse discrimination." Again, Reagan consistently played into the same politics of white resentment as Trump. 

• In 1980 when running again for president Reagan gave his first post-convention speech in Neshoba County, Mississippi. This happened to be the location of the murder of Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney in 1964 at the hands of the Klan. It was one of the most well-known atrocities of the civil rights era. In this speech Reagan infamously gave a full-throated endorsement of "states rights," a common euphemism for segregation. 

• In running for president Reagan also loved to use racial resentment when discussing welfare. He often used the case of real-life Linda Taylor to perpetuate the "welfare queen" myth. He also referred to a "strapping young buck" buying a steak with food stamps. All of this reinforced the fraudulent idea that whites were the only people earning an honest living and that Blacks just freeloaded off of them. This racist formulation is at the heart of Trumpism. 

• When Reagan was elected in 1980, white supremacists celebrated. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan even gave Reagan their endorsement. While unlike Trump he repudiated their support, the Klan well understood what Reagan's policies represented. 

I could go on and get into Reagan's policies as president, from gutting public housing to hobbling the Justice Department's civil rights division. I think you get the idea. While he was more willing to embrace immigrants than Trump, his politics were suffused with white resentment. Reagan's skill was burying it under bullshit and a smile. Trump has made the subtext the text, and until the deeper roots of Trumpism are torn out of the political Right, it will keep coming back.