The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Ronald Reagan, the sequel
If reality TV star Donald Trump makes it to the White House, he won’t be America’s first showbiz president. Tim Stanley on strange parallels between the hopeful and his predecessor
The problem with writing about Donald Trump is that he moves so fast. There have been several biographies squeezed out in record time since he announced his candidacy for president. All of them are now out of date. In the past month we have learnt that in some years he may have paid no federal income taxes; he has boasted about grabbing women “by the pussy”, and now faces several accusations of sexual assault. By the time this article is published – who knows?
But if you think The Donald is an enigma, you’re wrong. He misbehaves in plain sight. The former owner of Miss Universe has been nakedly chauvinist for decades, and his political ambitions are just as old. In 1987, he published a ( ghostwritten) memoir called The Art of the Deal, which was surprisingly critical of the incumbent president Ronald Reagan – hero of conservative Republicans. Trump, a showbiz obsessive who once considered becoming a movie producer, graded Reagan highly as “a smooth performer” but wondered if there was “anything beneath that smile”. Eyeing up the White House, Trump paid $95,000 to put ads in newspapers railing against America’s decline in gung-ho language we’d recognise today. “There’s nothing wrong with [the United States] that a little backbone can’t cure,” he said.
Reagan and Trump were, at first glance, very different men. Reagan makes one think of wholesome family values and small government, Trump of womanising and authoritarianism. But as recent books on Trump and a brilliant new biography of Reagan show, they were both fans of big money, hyper-patriots and – crucially – the product of the light entertainment industry. Trump is not a rejection of the Republican tradition. He’s part of the family.
Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in 1911. Throughout his presidency, Reagan cited his youth as a time of purity and decency. But, as Iwan Morgan shows in his superbly researched
Reagan: American Icon (IB Tauris),
it was more complicated than that. His father was a drunk. Ronnie’s first taste of showbiz was as a sports announcer. Wanting more, he moved to Hollywood in 1937, where he was courted aggressively by the rising star Jane Wyman. He only gave in to marriage when she attempted an overdose. He and Wyman lost a newborn baby; Wyman asked for a divorce in 1948. On Warner Bros’ payroll, Reagan effectively played himself – a Middle American boy, often touched by tragedy – until the war interrupted his career, diverting him into training films. Later, Reagan told the Israelis that he felt a kinship for their country because he had helped liberate the death camps. In fact, he never left America before the late Forties.
His first trip was to Britain and it was instrumental in his conversion to conservatism. Reagan did not like London. He said it smelt of “cow dung and coal soot”. He was disgusted by the regulations and unions – Morgan suggests that he was irritated by all the tea breaks during filming – and found the food at the Savoy so disgusting that he ordered 12 steaks to be shipped in from back home. They went off in the hotel’s inadequate storage.
Later, Reagan would insist that he never left the Democratic Party – which he had once endorsed so avidly – but that it left him by embracing this Labour style of collectivism. In fact, Reagan was the man on the move – to the libertarian Right. He helped break the communist-sympathising unions in Hollywood and gave evidence to Congress on Marxist infiltration (wearing a white suit and glasses, to suggest probity).
After Wyman left him, he played the field, bedding starlets. By the Sixties he had settled down with the wife of his dreams, Nancy Davis, who was enthusiastic about his aspirations. The rest of the family were not. When he became governor of California in 1966, his daughter Patti broke down in tears: “How could you do this to me?”
It’s tempting to see Reagan’s time in office as smoke and mirrors. His fans saw him as the voice of principled conservatism, but Morgan shows that, as governor, he signed off on big tax increases, the weakening of divorce laws and the liberalisation of abortion. As president, elected in 1980 thanks to a solid debate performance aided by the theft of his opponent’s briefing notes, his willingness to compromise was symbolised