History has a way of repeating itself, making the passage of time feel like riding a nauseating carousel. In this spinning spiral, we are constantly asked to descend into the past, to revisit familiar faces of evil, and, too often, to remember them for their good, not their bad. Historical revisionism is, in short, not cute!
The carousel of history really threw me for a loop this week as a new ad attacking President Donald Trump asked viewers to compare the 45th president unfavorably to the 40th, Ronald Reagan. Unsurprisingly, a bunch of Republicans want us to remember the movie star turned president as an emblem of American greatness and contrast to the reality star turned president.
As Ad Age reported, the group Republican Voters Against Trump released a new video ad on July 7 quoting Reagan’s infamous “Shining City on a Hill” speech. It juxtaposes the former president’s moralizing pleas to elect him in the 1980 presidential election with clips of the current president’s actions and behaviors that violate the virtues Reagan claims to venerate.
“Together, tonight, let us say that America is still united, still strong, still compassionate, still willing to stand by those who are persecuted or alone,” Reagan says in the ad, which excerpts parts of his televised address on the eve of the 1980 general election. “For those who are victims of police states or government-induced torture or terror, let us speak for them.”
Images flash by of Trump with despotic world leaders, migrants in detention, police threatening protesters, and senators ducking reporters. Smoke stacks and climate justice protest signs appear onscreen. We’re reminded of the former Trump associates who’ve been charged as the result of investigations into the 2016 campaign, juxtaposed with Reagan pledging a government staffed by “women and men of competence and high integrity.”
“Let us resolve tonight that young Americans…will always find there a city of hope in a country that is free,” Reagan says in the conclusion of both the ad and the original speech. “And let us resolve they will say of our day and our generation that we did keep faith with our God, that we did act worthy of ourselves, that we did protect and pass on lovingly that shining city on a hill.”
Where to even begin? First, I guess, let me acknowledge that Reagan — who spent nearly 30 years acting before moving into politics — sure could talk pretty on camera. The former actor’s charisma was a hugely consequential part of his appeal in the ’80s, 20 years after television had altered presidential elections forever. And that charisma, in turn, helped Reagan capitalize on the conditions that gave way to his landslide victory over Democratic president Jimmy Carter in the election that took place the day after the “Shining City on a Hill” address now being used to attack Trump.
That was hugely consequential not just for the 1980 election, but also for the shape conservative politics has taken since. As journalist Kenneth T. Walker put it in 2008, “Reagan gave conservatism a pleasant face and an appealing voice. This was central to his success.”
Reagan was the first Republican elected after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace following the Watergate scandal. The GOP needed someone like him: a charismatic, TV-ready smooth-talker who could turn the economic dissatisfaction of the last year of Carter’s presidency into a reason to vote red. But despite what the Republican Voters Against Trump might want you to believe, Reagan’s economic model — Reaganomics, as it came to be known — is exactly what Trump has been pushing for years.
It’s difficult to boil an entire administration’s worth of economic policy down to a few words, but for a working definition of Reaganomics, let’s look at a few key features of Reagan’s policies: cutting taxes (especially for the rich) for trickle-down economics, cutting social welfare spending, increasing military spending, and deregulating economic activity in the name of “free” markets. Reagan’s path to American greatness meant making rich people pay less in taxes, giving poor people less help, building the imperial forces he used in foreign policy, and making life easier for the capitalist class.
Sound familiar? It should given Trump's Reaganomics revitalization project. Trump has also cut taxes for the rich on the basis of trickle-down theory, cut social spending on programs like food stamps, increased military spending while leaning into imperial symbolism, and rolled back regulations on banks and fossil fuel industries, two of the worst actors in our national economy.
But it’s more than just the fundamental tenets of Trumponomics that the current president has in common with Reagan. Trump has inherited the world Reagan helped create. Reagan’s handling of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, characterized by downplaying and ignoring the threat, is mirrored in how Trump has handled COVID-19. Or look at Reagan’s massive expansion of the war on drugs, which only helped exacerbate the racist injustices at the very root of our so-called justice system, helping set the stage for the Black Lives Matter protests Trump has been so eager to decry this year, reviving the law-and-order politics of Reagan and Nixon before him.
The most bitter irony in the “Shining City on a Hill?” ad is the way the video spotlights Trump’s immigration policies. The migrants it shows in detention as a dig on Trump’s harmful policies could very well have been detained after fleeing countries that have suffered thanks to Reagan’s anti-communist meddling in Latin America. Immigrants from Central American countries in the Northern Triangle — Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras — have come to the United States in huge numbers in recent years, often comprising the migrant caravans Trump regularly freaks out about. Many of these migrants are fleeing violence and desperation that can be traced back, as Vice laid out in 2018, to Reagan-era funding for political atrocities in the region.
It makes sense that Republican Voters Against Trump are trying to create space between Reagan and Trump. The current president has historically made clear his own admiration for Reagan, and attacks on Trump’s ego seem particularly effective against him. But in doing so, they erase that the “great” America Trump set out to remake with his presidency is the city on Reagan’s hill, shining not with any moral virtue, but with the raging, white-hot, destructive fires of imperialism and capitalism.
As Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, the transgender Stonewall uprising veteran famed for her activism and organizing, told me last month, “Reagan was so wrong for the country…. And this guy that’s running it now is equally as bad, if not worse. But they don’t think about the fact that they’re bringing that history back.”
Trump is not a foil to Reagan; he is the natural evolution of the GOP’s emphasis on telegenic oppressors. It only makes sense that, 40 years after a movie star set this country on a course toward nationalism and economic exploitation, a reality TV star is doing everything he can to accelerate a downward spiral into mythical American exceptionalism that Reagan wrote the script for.
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