Donald Trump est sur une autre ligne. Trump a-t-il une doctrine? Que risquerait-on de ne pas voir en poussant trop loin la comparaison? Sa solution est de se recroqueviller et de montrer les dents. Before the fierce defenders of the Reagan faith collapse into seizures at the bracketing of their hero with the crudest and most vacuous presidential candidate in human memory, let me stipulate that I am not talking about Reagan the president in drawing this parallel, or about Reagan the man.
I am talking about Reagan the candidate, the canny politician who, after a dozen years of failed efforts attended by nonstop ridicule, ended up leading the GOP ticket at the same age Trump is now 69 and who, like his present-day counterpart, was best known to much of the electorate up until then as a B-list show-business personality. Trump would also argue, courtesy of Arnold Schwarzenegger, that serving as governor of California is merely a bush-league audition for the far greater responsibilities of hosting Celebrity Apprentice.
Trump has no core conviction beyond gratifying his own bottomless ego. Remarkably, though, the Reagan model has proved quite adaptable both to Trump and to our different times. While Trump has owned tacky, bankrupt casinos in Atlantic City, Reagan was a mere casino serf — the emcee of a flop nightclub revue featuring barbershop harmonizing and soft-shoe dancing at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas in While Trump would be the first president to have been married three times, here, too, he is simply updating his antecedent, who broke a cultural barrier by becoming the first White House occupant to have divorced and remarried.
Neither Reagan nor Trump paid any price with the Evangelical right for deviations from the family-values norm; they respectively snared the endorsements of Jerry Falwell and Jerry Falwell Jr. Both have marketed the same brand of outrage to the same angry segments of the electorate, faced the same jeering press, attracted some of the same battlefront allies Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Phyllis Schlafly , offended the same elites including two generations of Bushes , outmaneuvered similar political adversaries, and espoused the same conservative populism built broadly on the pillars of jingoistic nationalism, nostalgia, contempt for Washington, and racial resentment.
Craig Shirley , a longtime Republican political consultant and Reagan acolyte, has written authoritative books on the presidential campaigns of and that serve as correctives to the sentimental revisionist history that would have us believe that Reagan was cheered on as a conquering hero by GOP elites during his long climb to national power. There was also an abortive run in News and World Report survey of national and state Republican chairmen found they preferred George H.
