(LifeSiteNews) — The genial Midwesterner and the brash New Yorker have always had more in common than people realize.
Both are natural born optimists, with great senses of humor. Trump’s style is obviously a bit more barbed than Reagan’s folksy Irish manner was, but then he grew up in New York City, not in a small town in Illinois. What can you expect?
The truth is that Reagan, under his easy-going manner, was made of some pretty stern stuff. Who else, after being felled by an assassin’s bullet, would have had the presence of mind to say to the doctors treating him: “I hope you are all Republicans.”
They both love the great outdoors. Reagan’s favorite pastime was horseback riding. As he once told me, “The best thing for the inside of a man is the outside of a horse.”
The best thing for the inside of a man, in Trump’s view, is to be lining up a shot down the fairway. At least until someone tries to shoot you on the green, and the Secret Service asks you to put your clubs away.
Though Reagan was not often seen in church, he was a man of deep faith in both his country and in his God. Trump, too, believes that America is one nation under God, and that he himself has been preserved from an assassin’s bullet to help ensure it stays that way.
Just like Reagan, Trump puts the American people first. And he sees the country as a unified whole, not a disparate collection of voting blocks to be bribed, manipulated, and ultimately controlled.
Just like Reagan, Trump has clear policy goals that he wants to pursue – lowering taxes, cutting big government, taming inflation, and rebuilding America’s industrial base.
Just like Reagan, Trump wants to defeat the new “axis of evil” – China, Russia, and Iran – in the same way that Reagan defeated the Soviet Union and its satellites. “We win, they lose,” in Reagan’s famous formulation.
But the real proof of the common thread linking Reagan and Trump is that they are hated by exactly the same people.
I am not talking about Leftists, who can be counted upon to hate virtually everyone and everything outside their immediate orbit. I am talking about the Uniparty of Washington, D.C., insiders – yes, it already existed in 1980s – who are primarily interested in protecting their own grift.
There is no better proof of this than the reaction of the Bush clan – the ultimate RINO insiders – to both men.
In 1980, Reagan won a bitterly contested Republican primary contest with George H. W. Bush – three-time congressman, former CIA director, and good friend of China. Told that it was necessary to unify the party, Reagan made the mistake of accepting the first Bush as his vice president, and a Bushie by the name of James Baker as his chief of staff.
The first Bush was never onboard with many of Reagan’s policies, however, while Baker did his best to not “let Reagan be Reagan.”
Nor surprisingly, when Bush was elected president eight years later at the end of Reagan’s second term, the sweeping staff changeover when he took office resembled a hostile takeover. The Reaganites were all fired, while RINOs flooded in to take their place. Many of Reagan’s pro-American policies were undone.
Bush himself apparently forgot to whom he owed his presidency. While Reagan had set aside time to have lunch with his vice president every week for eight years, once Bush himself was elected, he never once even called the former president on whose giant shoulders he stood. Members of the Globalist Elite secretly harbored nothing but distain for America’s first populist president since Teddy Roosevelt.
In 2016, Trump kicked another Bush to the curb in the Republican primaries. But while he didn’t make the mistake of picking Jeb Bush for his running mate, he did repeat Reagan’s mistake of picking another D.C. insider for the slot, and for the very same reason: He had been told it was necessary to pick someone like Mike Pence “to unify the party.”
And, again like Reagan, he brought in a number of D.C. insiders to staff his administration, many of whom worked secretly to slow walk or even stifle his policies. Just ask Peter Navarro, who had to overcome stiff opposition to implement Trump’s tariffs on China.
But while Reagan, who served back-to-back terms of office, never had the opportunity for a complete make-over of his administration, the same is not true of Trump. If re-elected, his policies will be far more far-reaching, and the people he selects to implement them far more committed, than they were in 2017.
The situation that America faces in 2024 is eerily similar to that we faced in 1980.
Just as in 1980, our country is in the grip of double-digit inflation, with dramatically rising food, housing, and energy costs. Just as now, the poor were getting poorer, the rich were getting richer, and the middle class was getting crushed in between.
Just as Carter’s was in 1980, the Biden-Harris record is such a disaster that Kamala cannot possibly run on it, so she is instead trying to demonize her opposition. Although leading Democrats in those days never called Reagan “Hitler” or half of Americans “garbage” either, they did falsely label him a “warmonger.”
Of course, both Reagan and Trump kept the peace for their terms in office. American strength is the best way to deter tyrants like Xi Jinping and Little Rocket Man.
The desperate name-calling of the Harris campaign suggests that the coming election is going to be an exact reprise of 1980. The polls in that race were virtually tied for months, as people weighed the economic disaster of the Carter years against the California governor’s promises.
Then, in the last week of the campaign, millions of Americans who had been sitting on the fence came to a decision. They decided that they were not better off than they had been before Carter took office and decided to turn the page.
Reagan won in a landslide, and then went on to repeat this feat four years later against Jimmy Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, in an even more decisive fashion. America enjoyed eight years of peace and prosperity.
While we won’t know for sure until all the votes are counted, all indications are that Trump is surging to a similar victory.
And it will, once again, be morning in America.
Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of The Devil and Communist China (TAN Books). He wrote several speeches for the former president after Reagan left office.
