President Trump should be holding off on future boasts that he is “far greater” than Ronald Reagan.
His latest comments were made in an interview that appears in a new book by boosters Corey R. Lewandowski and David N. Bossie called “Trump’s Enemies.”
As reported by my colleague Paul Bedard, Trump said, “The amazing thing is that you have certain people who are conservative Republicans that if my name weren’t Trump, if it were John Smith, they would say I’m the greatest president in history and I blow Ronald Reagan away.”
He continued, “All these guys that if they looked at my agenda with a different name … and he got the biggest regulation cuts in history in less than two years, judges, environmental stuff, getting out of the Paris horror show. If you said that conservative president John Smith did that, they would say he’s the greatest president. Far greater than Ronald Reagan.”
Trump is essentially making the case that anti-Trump conservatives will never give him credit for his accomplishments just because they have personal animus toward him.
In reality, there are two broad categories on which to evaluate Trump: One is to look at his personal characteristics and rhetoric and the other is to examine his policies. Some conservatives emphasize one over the other, while other conservatives take both categories into consideration.
On the policy front, to date Trump has governed largely within the realm of what you’d expect from a conventional Republican president. He cut taxes, pushed to roll back regulations, appointed conservative judges, increased military spending, and spiked the deficit. Anybody who supported some of those policies under prior Republican presidents should be applauding Trump for pursuing them and should not be blinded by their hatred of him as a personality.
At the same time, however, it’s hard to evaluate a presidency two years in, let alone compare it to one that lasted eight years. For instance, a lot of the deregulation Trump has pushed will take years to put into fruition. His environmental deregulation efforts have been mismanaged and stymied by courts. His escalating trade battles have rocked markets, but his legacy will be affected by whether he actually forces China into concessions, or if he merely triggered a costly trade war without anything to show for it.
Reagan won the Cold War through a consistent and coherent policy of pressure aimed at the USSR, while Trump’s initiatives from the Middle East to Asia are still very much in flux.
Reagan and Trump both presided over a strong economy, but Reagan took office at a time when inflation was in double digits and unemployment was at 7.5 percent. In contrast, when Trump took office, unemployment was at 4.8 percent and inflation was around 2 percent.
Reagan’s tax cut, which he worked to pass through a Democratic Congress, was triple the size of Trump’s and is still the largest in history when measured as a percentage of GDP.
Trump could end up appointing the strongest crop of conservative judges, but it’s also worth noting that when Reagan was appointing judges, there was not a deep bench of conservative judges to choose from and the conservative legal establishment was in its infancy. There was no activist movement in existence to fight for the confirmation of Robert Bork as there was with Justice Brett Kavanaugh. To be sure, Trump deserves credit, but context is also important.
Moving on to the rhetoric and personal aspects of the presidency, Trump’s defenders alternatively cheer him on, or tell us the craziness doesn’t matter, while his critics suggest it should take prominence over his policy accomplishments.
Presidential rhetoric is important, however. Reagan used rhetoric to call out the evil of the Soviet Union and to promote America’s interests abroad even as he agreed to negotiate with our enemies. Instead of displaying such strength and consistency, Trump has been erratic and shown weakness in defending dictators such as Kim Jong Un.
The reality is that even if giving Trump credit for his policy achievements, it’s impossible to ignore how he has contributed to the coarsening of discourse and how his nastiness has turned off people who otherwise might be open to conservative policies even if it may fire up his supporters.
Reagan’s accomplishment was to actually make the idea of conservatism, something associated with the pre-New Deal era and Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat, mainstream by speaking hopefully and optimistically. He looked to win converts, and did. He captured 44 states in 1980 and 49 states voted to re-elect him.
For decades that followed, even Democrats had to run on the idea that they really wanted to cut middle-class taxes, and because of the political environment Reagan created, even Bill Clinton had to declare “the era of big government is over.” Candidate Barack Obama, in his first presidential campaign, conceded, “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and a way that Bill Clinton did not.”
What’s especially amazing is that Reagan accomplished this without the tools of modern media to get his message out. He didn’t have a Twitter account; he didn’t have Fox News; and conservative talk radio was in its infancy only toward the end of his presidency. He had to speak to the people, despite facing unceasing attacks from a hostile media at a time when most Americans got their news from liberal newspapers or three TV networks.
Ultimately, it will take decades to fairly assess Trump’s legacy. But one thing that Reagan had going for him is that he had a coherent ideology that was easily translatable for future candidates in subsequent eras. Trump’s eclectic brand is very personality driven and affected by his reaction to daily headlines, so it’s less clear how his influence will be felt down the road.
