Donald Trump is Reagan’s heir

As Donald Trump fights what now looks like an uphill battle against Kamala Harris, many Republicans find themselves thinking back to their high-school sweetheart.

They fell in love with conservative politics thanks to Ronald Reagan, and they’re ambivalent about Trump.

Over Labor Day weekend, they’ll have a chance to travel back to the golden age of the 1980s – but they can’t afford to stay there.

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“Reagan,” a biographical film many years in the making, starring Dennis Quaid as the man who becomes the 40th president, opens Aug. 30.

It’s not going to challenge “Deadpool and Wolverine” for dominance at the box office.

Nor is the movie – directed by Sean McNamara and based on Paul Kengor’s book “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism” – going to sweep next year’s Academy Awards.

It’s a modest production about a great man, but it comes at a time when old-guard conservatives are more uncertain than ever about how today’s GOP, the party of Trump, relates to Reagan’s principles.

Stoking their doubts are bitter ex-Republicans who now make a living by sowing division on the right and plumping for Democrats.

These are jilted consultants, defeated officeholders who blame Trump for their crashed careers, and a dozen or so pundits who once thought they script command the party’s direction – and would now rather be rewarded by the other side than swallow their pride and admit their mistakes.

These bad-faith actors have made a habit of appropriating Reagan’s name, taking advantage of the fact he hasn’t been around to defend it for 20 years and was sidelined by Alzheimer’s a decade before that.

The new movie offers no aid or comfort to phony conservatives for Kamala.

Kengor, a professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania who became the editor of The American Spectator two years ago, is a plumb-line conservative.

His book and the biopic based on it showcase Reagan’s anti-communism.

But it’s true that Reagan’s gentility is nothing like Trump’s provocative personality.

And some Reagan Republicans wonder if Trump hasn’t turned his back on the free-market policies the Gipper championed, despite the historic tax cut Trump delivered in his first term.

Does the Trump-Vance ticket’s support for tariffs and courting of trade unions show a disregard for what Reagan stood for?

Republicans who ask themselves that may not vote for Harris, but if their enthusiasm for this year’s GOP nominee wanes, as they look longingly back to 1984, the potential for Trump to fall short in the swing states is grave.

The undecided neighbor notices when the Republican next door isn’t eager to get out and vote – or go door-to-door volunteering – for his party’s candidate.

In battleground states where outcomes are as close as they were in 2016 and 2020, morale is decisive: Just ask Hillary Clinton, who thought “blue wall” voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan would turn out for her whether or not she showed up to ask for their votes.

Yet Trump in fact has delivered for Reagan voters – just as, back in the day, Reagan delivered for the Americans who are now Trump voters.

Trump’s get-tough attitude on trade was Reagan’s, too, and both were willing to use tariffs as necessary:

Reagan saved Harley-Davidson by hiking tariffs on Japanese motorcycles more than tenfold, from 4.4% to a high of 49.4%.

The real Reagan, not the Trump-shaming myth, courted union voters and unions themselves, yet didn’t let even those that endorsed him, like the air traffic controllers’ PATCO, dictate policy or jeopardize the national interest.

Trump returned America to the Reagan principle of peace through strength in foreign policy – while Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have unleashed chaos on a scale reminiscent of the Carter administration, when Iran seized American hostages and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

Under Biden and Harris, there are American hostages in the Middle East once again, and Russia is brutalizing Ukraine.

Trump doesn’t speak in the idealistic register of Reagan, but he’s like Reagan in his willingness to engage in daring diplomacy – as Reagan did with Mikhail Gorbachev – and also like him in boldly changing the way Americans think about our most dangerous rival.

In Reagan’s time, that was the USSR – today it’s China, and Trump has forced both parties to stop being complacent about Beijing.

The Reagan movie ought to remind voters who cherish the Gipper’s record that history hinged on his election.

The future of all Reagan secured for the country back then now hinges on what happens in this election, between a Republican who overall continues the Reagan legacy and a Democrat – Kamala Harris – who wants the memory of Reagan’s America to go the way of the Soviet Union.

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