Why Trump is the anti-Reagan

In many ways, Donald seems simply a reboot of Ronald for a rougher age. Both men were former TV personalities who, by their first full month in the Oval Office, were already 70 years old. “Make America Great Again” is a nod to Reagan’s 1980 campaign slogan (“Let’s make America great again”), and Trump has similarly managed to sell himself as the champion of working-class voters – his zest for cutting rich friends’ taxes and his history of union-busting notwithstanding. 

At the core of both men’s appeal is a proud hostility to the idea that America should accept limits on its self-image as an infinite spring of ambition, wealth creation and general greatness. Neither high taxes nor restrictions on borrowing should stand in the way; nor should environmental regulation. 

Hand-wringing concern about telling the truth should not be an obstacle either. Reagan was famously freestyle with facts, and an enthusiastic promoter of a conspiracy theory that accused his White House predecessors of leaving soldiers who had gone ‘missing in action’ to rot in Vietnamese camps long after the war was over. As with Trump, all that mattered was the story. 

Yet at the same time, the basic difference between the two men could hardly be more obvious. In 1981, when the cheery Reagan was wounded by an assassin’s bullet, he joked with the doctors. When Trump was shot last year, he yelled “Fight! Fight! Fight!” 

Reagan’s re-election campaign 40 years ago was full of sunny, unifying optimism, celebrating how the “pride is back”, and economic recovery meant it was “morning again in America”. Trump has exhorted Americans to “dream big again”, but a more audible theme of his campaign was his very un-Reagan-like desire for retribution. 

If Trump’s fury makes it seem he is abandoning the legacy of his party’s greatest modern president, however, it might be fairer to say he’s promising to fix it. Look beneath all that too-good-to-be-true Reagan storytelling in 1984, lauding America as a “shining city”, and you can see the beginnings of the forces that have driven Trumpist populism. 

At the Democratic National Convention that summer, New York governor Mario Cuomo made a much-acclaimed speech arguing that there were many people living in the shining city who Reagan never saw, like “a woman who had been denied the help she needed to feed her children because you said you needed the money for a tax break for a millionaire”. The economic revival of 1984 came at the price of rising inequality, sharpened by accelerating deindustrialisation. The old industrial midwest was already being written off as the “rust belt”

As the historian John Ganz argued last year in his book When the Clock Broke, the lineaments of today’s right-wing populist rage took shape in the early 1990s. And this happened in significant part as a consequence of changes set in train by the Reagan administration’s business-orientated internationalism. 

Unlike Trump, Reagan was a champion of free trade. He denounced protectionists as demagogues “willing to declare a trade war against our friends” while “cynically waving the American flag”. His policies laid the ground for the North American Free Trade Agreement. 

When this took effect, new populists soon popped up. The independent presidential candidate Ross Perot denounced the “giant sucking sound” of American jobs being pulled to Mexico, and eventually won 18.9% of the vote in 1992. Former Reagan aide Pat Buchanan broke from his old chief’s beliefs, crying “America First!”

On immigration too, Trump and many of his supporters are effectively reacting against Reagan’s legacy. In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act gave amnesty to 1.2 million undocumented migrants. As the authors of one recent study, White Rural Rage, point out, this also made it easier for corporate recruiters to steer Latino migrants into low-paid work in rural areas, triggering much local resentment. 

And the American heartland of the 1980s saw the sowing of other seeds that are still coming to fruition. Many small farmers had become heavily indebted, and were struggling to stay afloat; Reagan’s administration offered a degree of help, but largely insisted that agriculture was a business like any other. 

In 1986-87, nearly a million people were forced off the land in a single year, with giant agribusinesses often taking over. By the 1990s, this had left a legacy of bitterness which fuelled the emergence of the aggressively anti-Washington militia movement: another incubator of today’s populist fury. 

In America as a whole, the inequality Mario Cuomo denounced 40 years ago has only grown more extreme. Since 1979, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the incomes of the top 1% of US households has leapt by 326%; those of the middle 60% by just 73%. 

After the 1990s, the next big leap towards the age of Trump came with the financial crash of 2008, when the ever-more-sophisticated financialisation of the US economy, which took off in the 1980s, came crashing down. Yet it was not those who lost their homes who were bailed out, but the banks who lured them into dodgy loans. 

For a brief moment it looked as though the Occupy movement might capture the rage that followed, before it was captured by a resurgence of populism on the right – first with the Tea Party, then Trump. 

So, without quite saying it out loud, Trump has cast himself as Reagan’s nemesis: railing against jobs being sucked abroad and open borders, against Wall Street and big corporations. Yet his actions tell quite a different story. He has appointed a cabinet of billionaires and has asked the richest man in the world to take a chainsaw to the federal budget. 

He appears to have convinced some Americans he’ll fix the legacy of the 1980s, and convinced others he’ll bring it back. If Trump is to be as transformative as Reagan, he will have to repudiate his legacy for real. 

Phil Tinline is the author of The Death of Consensus. His documentary, Archive on 4: Ronald vs. Donald, goes out on BBC Radio 4 at 8pm on Saturday January 18