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Ronald
Reagan Was Once Donald Trump
FR's
latest column should be printed and laminated
and kept in your wallet. Whenever you see more
ineptitude and corruption and nincompoops drunk
with power, pull it out and read it. (2005/10/02)
[...] What put off Reagan’s fellow Republicans will sound very
familiar. He proposed an economic program — 30 percent tax cuts,
increased military spending, a balanced budget — whose math was voodoo
and then some. He prided himself on not being “a part of the Washington
Establishment” and mocked Capitol Hill’s “buddy system” and its
collusion with “the forces that have brought us our problems—the
Congress, the bureaucracy, the lobbyists, big business, and big labor.”
He kept a light campaign schedule, regarded debates as optional,
wouldn’t sit still to read briefing books, and often either improvised
his speeches or worked off index cards that contained anecdotes and
statistics gleaned from Reader’s Digest and the right-wing journal
Human Events — sources hardly more elevated or reliable than the
television talk shows and tabloids that feed Trump’s erroneous and
incendiary pronouncements.
Frank
Rich, of all people, seems to "get it." His article makes enough valid
comparisons between Ronald Maximus and Donald Trump to make me—for
a minute—think
that the erstwhile New York Times theater critic ("Butcher of
Broadway"), before becoming a political essayist (mostly famous for "outing"
David Brock, "
from personal knowledge some suspect, and earning a reputation outside
of New York as a left wing prance-about, and darling of likes of Daily
KOS, which is all I really need to have said in the first place.
But no. However, he does stumble upon this
pivotal truth:
But
Reagan’s and Trump’s opposing styles belie their similarities of
substance. 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
... (before adding "and
racial resentment.")
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