Political Wire

Is Trump the Second Coming of Reagan?

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New Yorker: “Since the start of Trump’s outsider campaign to remake the Republican Party in his own image, his partisans have branded him a Reagan for our times—a brasher and brusquer one, perhaps, but like Reagan in that they were both renegades who fought the party establishment and politically revitalized the G.O.P. with a new coalition of former Democrats like themselves.”

“But, for the most part, the heads exploding at the Reagan-Trump parallels have been those of staunch Reaganites, many of whom hate the comparisons between the sunny, optimistic Cold Warrior they still idolize and the wheeling-and-dealing, narcissistic America Firster now in the White House.”

The President Will See You Now

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Just published: The President Will See You Now: My Stories and Lessons from Ronald Reagan’s Final Years by Peggy Grande.

People interviews the author, who was Reagan’s longtime assistant:

Once he was in his office entertaining visitors – as he often did. He was telling a familiar story, one he told so often even Grande knew it word for word. “The story was flowing off his tongue effortlessly,” Grande writes in the memoir. “This was one of his greatest hits.”

Just before delivering the punch line, Reagan stopped. “He looked at me with a look I would eventually get to know very well but didn’t understand yet,” Grande writes. “I knew what he was supposed to say and he knew that he did, too. But it didn’t come out.”

Reagan Would Never Have Endorsed Trump

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Mickey Edwards: “As the national chairman of the American Conservative Union and a founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation, I sat with him at his annual appearances at the Conservative Political Action Conference. I saw his instinctive compassion as, at my request, he diverted Air Force One to fly us over the city of Bartlesville, in my congressional district, after it had been heavily damaged by a tornado. As a member of the Republican congressional leadership, I met with him in the Oval Office every week of his presidency.”

“I know Ronald Reagan would never have endorsed Donald Trump for the presidency. Not ever. No matter what.”

The Reagan Era Has Ended

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William Galston: “The minute-to-minute coverage of the 2016 presidential primaries threatens to obscure the larger story: While Sen. Bernie Sanders is pressing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to move further and faster down the progressive road, Donald Trump is waging and winning the third major revolution in the Republican Party since World War II.”

“Mr. Trump’s candidacy has showed that the cadre of genuine social conservatives is smaller than long assumed, that grass-roots Republican support for large military commitments in the Middle East has withered, and that the business community is politically homeless.”

“So it has come to this: A mercantilist isolationist is the odds-on favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination.”

Trump Says He Would Be Better than Reagan

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Donald Trump tells The Brody File that he will be “much stronger in protecting the Evangelicals” than Ted Cruz and invoked Ronald Reagan.

Said Trump: “Ronald Reagan, he didn’t read the Bible every day, seven days a week. But, he was a great president. And he was a great president for Christianity. And frankly, I would say that I would be a far better leader.”

Trump Says He’s Bigger Than Reagan

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Donald Trump told Bloomberg that he’s building a movement bigger than that of former President Ronald Reagan.

Said Trump: “I think that the closest thing I can think of is Reagan, but I don’t think it’s the intensity that we have. Now, Reagan had a little bit of this, but I don’t think to the same extent—but he also won.”

He added: “It’s not just like, ‘Gee. It’s a little political rally and people are showing up to have fun.’ These people are committed.”

Trump Had Few Ties to Reagan

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“Like many hopefuls before him, presidential candidate Donald Trump has embraced Ronald Reagan, the icon of the modern Republican Party,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“But a peek inside the archives at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, host of Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate, tells a different story. Aides in the Reagan White House, peppered with invitations to Trump events, mostly kept the real-estate mogul at arm’s length, except when they were trying to stop his donations to Democrats or soothe his ‘large ego,’ as one memo put it.”

Trump Quote of the Day

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“If you look at Ronald Reagan, and he was a Democrat, he was actually, Don, he was a Democrat with a very liberal, or at least a pretty liberal bent, and he became a Republican with a somewhat conservative — I wouldn’t say very, but he was a conservative Republican.”

— Donald Trump, quoted by The Hill, comparing himself to Ronald Reagan.

Reagan’s Speeches Analyzed for Dementia

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A “clever new analysis” has found that subtle changes in Ronald Reagan’s “speaking patterns linked to the onset of dementia were apparent years before doctors diagnosed his Alzheimer’s disease in 1994,” the New York Times reports.

“The findings, published in The Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease by researchers at Arizona State University, do not prove that Mr. Reagan exhibited signs of dementia that would have adversely affected his judgment and ability to make decisions in office. But the research does suggest that alterations in speech one day might be used to predict development of Alzheimer’s and other neurological conditions years before symptoms are clinically perceptible.”

RNC Selling Reagan/Bush T-Shirts

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New York Times: “Republicans have been boasting of their new digital campaign toolbox, but as the 2016 presidential race kicks into gear, they have gone retro by using a vintage T-shirts as a fund-raising device. The Republican National Committee is making a year-end push to peddle red and blue ‘Reagan/Bush ’84’ shirts for $27.”

Reagan and Bush Also Acted to Shield Immigrants

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President Obama’s “anticipated order that would shield millions of immigrants now living illegally in the U.S. from deportation is not without precedent,” the AP reports.

“Two of the last three Republican presidents — Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush — did the same thing in extending amnesty to family members who were not covered by the last major overhaul of immigration law in 1986.”

“There was no political explosion then comparable to the one Republicans are threatening now.”

Reagan Had Secret Tapes Too

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President Ronald Reagan “secretly recorded some of his conversations with foreign leaders, discovered author William Doyle,” who shared some of these never-heard tapes exclusively with the New York Post.

“Doyle said Reagan recorded many, but not all, of his phone calls with heads of state through the Situation Room switchboard, so that an accurate record could be kept of conversations that often included translators and bad connections.”

Taegan Goddard

Taegan Goddard

Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.

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