Soon the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute will host Justin Trudeau. The smug Canadian prime minister will lay out his democratic socialist vision this Friday, as antithetical to Reagan’s as anything could be. Although tickets have already sold out, it isn’t difficult to forecast the speech. Where Reagan reduced government, Trudeau has increased it. Where Reagan unbridled the economy, Trudeau has tried commanding and controlling it.
But the leaders of the Reagan Library are either unaware of, or are totally unconcerned with those ironies.
“His team is focused on creating new jobs, fostering strength out of Canada’s rich diversity, fighting climate change, and achieving reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples,” reads an advertisement for the event which could just as well be introducing socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., or a more woke, modern version of Marx. “A proud feminist, Mr. Trudeau appointed Canada’s first gender balanced Cabinet.”
To be sure the exchange of ideas is always a good thing. The elevation of a communist apologist, however, is another. Nowhere is this more clear than in how Reagan and Trudeau treated Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
When that strongman died, the Trudeau eulogy was so weepy, wanton, and indifferent to the very real suffering of the Cuban people that Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida had to ask whether it was a parody.
“It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest serving President,” he said in a November 2016 statement. The man who killed hundreds of thousands of his own people wasn’t just “a remarkable leader,” Trudeau concluded, he was a family “friend.”
That much isn’t exaggeration. Back in 1976, at the height of the Cold War, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau brought his wife and youngest son, Michel, to visit the communist island. Standing next to the dictator who wore a gun on his hip and who put communist missiles within striking distance of Miami, the elder Trudeau shouted, “Long live Prime Minister Fidel Castro!”
A picture of Castro cradling the youngest Trudeau is reportedly still a treasured family heirloom. Reagan was not as friendly.
When Cuban-backed communists overthrew the government of Grenada, just seven years after the Trudeau trip, Reagan sent a small army to help wrestle back control of the tiny Caribbean island nation. It was the first time U.S. troops fought with Cuban forces since the Spanish-American War.
Speaking afterward, Reagan would say of the 19-war dead that they gave everything for the “last, best hope of a better future.” Speaking from the Oval Office, the president concluded that “we cannot and will not dishonor them now and the sacrifices they’ve made by failing to remain as faithful to the cause of freedom and the pursuit of peace as they have been.”
It seems the Reagan Library, and those academics who make a living off of it, are not so dedicated.
