Trump Is Never Going To Be Reagan

This argument was offensively stupid: (1) By 1980, Reagan’s most recent work experience had been as a two-term governor of a large state and major-party presidential candidate; (2) Reagan had only one ex-wife and had never boasted in print about bedding married women; and (3) The “dunce” slander has been ably refuted by Reagan’s personal diaries and letters, which reveal a mind that was subtle, well-read, and had been preoccupied with political thought for decades. You can bet the milk money that when Donald Trump’s presidential library is built—yes, this is a thing that will happen and please, God, let him put it in Atlantic City—there will be no such revelations.

But that doesn’t mean that the core of the Reagan-Trump argument was ridiculous, because the best version of it would have gone something like this:

Now, speaking only for myself, I would not have bought this argument back in, say, March 2016. But I’ve tried not to close myself off to it over the last two years. There have been flashes of a kind of Reaganite Trump, the best example being his decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem—which is the kind of brash upsetting of the apple cart that no normal Republican president would have dared to do. (And it worked out quite well, with little of the fallout that establishment types feared and/or predicted.) Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate treaty probably counts on this score, too.

But after that? The Trump presidency has been a combination of the policies Mitt Romney would have pursued in 2013—corporate and personal tax cuts; conservative judges; regulatory rollback; punting on Obamacare; no wall—and the sort of stuff that non-Trumpers feared most—playing footsie with white supremacists; lubing up Kim Jong-un; getting pantsed at negotiations.

Yet in Trump’s defense, that’s all subjective. I’m sure there are people sitting in a studio at Fox News right now who would insist that Trump’s only failures have been the result of a hostile media working hand-in-glove with liberal activists and the Deep State on a witch-hunt to blah-blah-blah. The media hated Reagan; the media hates Trump; ergo Trump is Reagan. So let’s leave the subjective side of the parallel alone and focus on the objective side: Is Donald Trump on the brink of winning a landslide re-election that creates a viable political coalition for the next decade?

No.

This isn’t to say that Trump can’t win re-election. At this moment in time, I’d put him as a slightly better than even-money favorite. But let’s look at the numbers.

Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 with 43.9 million votes, which was good for 50.7 percent of the total. Keep in mind, that was against a sitting president with a credible third party candidate trying to peel off moderate Republicans from Reagan’s left flank. In 1984, Reagan added more than 10 million votes to his haul. Think about that. People tend to focus on Reagan winning 49 states in 1984, but the fact that he increased his total number of votes by almost 25 percent is even more impressive.

Let’s put that into context: Most of the time, sitting presidents who lose votes from their first-time total lose re-election. Barack Obama was the exception to the rule, losing 4 million votes from 2008 to 2012, but winning anyhow. Eisenhower added 2 million votes and Bill Clinton added a little less than 3 million votes, which represented about a 6 percent increase for each of them. And then there’s Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush.

In 1972, Nixon added 15 million votes—almost a 50 percent increase from his 1968 total. And in 2004, Bush added 12 million votes, a 23 percent increase.

So what’s the difference between Trump and Nixon/Reagan/Bush?

In Nixon’s case, the big difference is that there had been a major conservative third-party candidate in 1968. In 1972 there was not, so Nixon pocketed most of George Wallace’s 10 million votes right off the bat. There is no well of third-party votes from 2016 waiting for Trump to draw on in 2020.

But the bigger issue is popularity. There was some back-and-forth last week between Ezra Klein and Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei about Trump’s political strategy and the most interesting thing to come out of it was this graph from Gallup:

Charles Franklin/Gallup data

At this point in his first term, Nixon’s approval rating was 60 percent and he hadn’t pegged a single poll number below the 50 percent mark. Bush was even higher, at 75 percent. Now sure, that was an artificial number because of 9/11, but he, too, hadn’t polled below 50 percent approval at this point.

Which brings us to Reagan: Reagan was just below 55 percent approval and had some polls where he dipped below the 50 percent mark. The important thing to remember, however, is that the economy of Reagan’s first two years was terrible. Inflation was running higher than 10 percent and oil prices were the highest they’d ever been. The unemployment rate was on the rise, starting at 7.5 percent and eventually hitting almost 11 percent. Year-over-year GDP growth was negative from 1981 to 1982.

In short, Reagan won his sweeping re-election because he started from a high base of approval even while the economy was in a bad recession. When the economy improved, Reagan ran over Walter Mondale like a Mack truck and cemented a fusionist governing coalition that lasted for almost a generation.

Trump, on the other hand, starts from a remarkably low base of support: He’s got far and away the lowest approval ratings of any post-war president and, contrary to what he might claim, has not gotten within sniffing distance of 50 percent. And he’s been pulling these numbers while being floated along by an economy that’s very strong: 3.8 percent unemployment; inflation under 2 percent; cheap gas; annual GDP growth over 2 percent. What’s more, Trump’s numbers are both remarkably low and remarkably stable: More than any president since LBJ, Trump has both a hard floor and a hard ceiling.

Think about it this way: In order for Trump to pull a Reagan, he’d suddenly have to break out of the band he’s been in since taking office and get a lot more popular over the next two years. How is that going to happen? Is unemployment going to fall to 2 percent? Is GDP growth going to jump to 4 percent? It’s possible. But not likely. From where we sit right now, our economic upside is pretty limited and our downside is pretty substantial. That’s the way the business cycle works.

That doesn’t mean Trump won’t be re-elected. The economy could stay strong. The Democrats could nominate another deeply flawed candidate. There could be a crisis that temporarily inflates Trump’s popularity for a time. By the same token, it’s easy to see how Trump could lose: The economy sours; or the Democrats nominate a star; or some crisis exposes Trump and hurts him with voters.

In some ways, the belief in Trump-as-Reagan mirrors the Never Trump delusion of early 2016, where Trump skeptics (like me) believed that at some point the bubble would pop and Trump would come down to earth. That never happened because it turned out there wasn’t a bubble: Trump was what he was: A guy with 45 percent support in a field of 17 candidates. Which was enough to win the nomination.

And so the people for whom Trump is destined to be Reagan are deluding themselves, too. Trump isn’t going to suddenly become so popular that he shifts the landscape of American politics. He is what he is: A guy with 42 percent approval and no real prospect of getting to 50 percent. Which, in 2020, might be good enough to win another tight general election. Or might not.

There is no realignment. No coalition. No promised land. There is no version of this story where Trump’s presidency is anything but a joyless slog which humiliates his defenders, debases the nation, enrages the left, and repulses independents. Now maybe that’s enough. Heck, maybe that’s all Republicans really want these days.

But look at the numbers and you’ll understand that Ronald Reagan isn’t walking through that door.