Trump may want to emulate Reagan
Ex-president faced being near death with humor, calm
WASHINGTON — When President Ronald Reagan was shot and nearly killed by a would-be assassin, the country rallied around him. But he also hadn’t spent eight months downplaying the threat of deranged gunmen.
With President Donald Trump’s announcement that he and his wife had tested positive for coronavirus, I thought back to the last time the country confronted a major presidential health scare and what we might learn from those dramatic few days nearly four decades ago.
Reagan was shot by John Hinckley Jr. on March 30, 1981, as the president and his entourage left the Washington Hilton, where he had given a speech to union members. It was just 70 days into Reagan’s first term.
Hinckley, standing 15 feet from the president, unleashed six shots in 1.7 seconds. He wounded three men — including press secretary James Brady — before his final shot deflected off the side of the limo and hit Reagan.
Thanks to the quick actions and thinking of his lead Secret Service agent, Jerry Parr, the president was rushed to George Washington University Hospital. He was in bad shape. Doctors and nurses did not expect him to live. He collapsed upon walking into the emergency room, and a nurse could not detect his pulse.
In the end, Reagan survived, but it was a close call as Reagan lost more than half his blood volume, and doctors would pluck a mangled bullet an inch from his heart.
But he emerged from the
ordeal with a much stronger bond with the public, one that stayed with him through his presidency.
Whether Trump can gain similar sympathy is very much in doubt — not only because of the events leading up to his illness, but also the sharp differences between the personalities of the two men, which can be seen by their immediate reactions to their health crises.
Not long after he was rushed to the hospital, with
a chest tube in his side draining copious amounts of blood, Reagan spotted his wife enter the trauma bay.
“Honey, I forgot to duck,” he said, reprising a famous remark made by boxer Jack Dempsey after he lost the heavyweight championship in 1926.
Just before surgeons started their operation to remove the bullet and stop the bleeding, Reagan dramatically rose on an elbow and said, “I hope you are all Republicans.”
White House officials made sure those jokes and quips were quickly disseminated to the press. The public knew what they signified: Reagan was brave, as well as concerned about those around him. His first instinct was to calm his wife. He joked with the doctors to calm their nerves. He could tell they were all on edge.
After surgery, Reagan traded notes with observations and wisecracks with his nurses, further cementing his reputation as calm in the face of danger.
His popularity soared. “What happened to Reagan on Monday is the stuff of which legends are made,” the late and esteemed Washington Post political writer David Broder wrote as Reagan recovered.
Three decades later in an interview for my book on the assassination attempt, Broder said Reagan “was politically untouchable from that point on.”
“He became a mythic figure,” Broder said. The public’s affection for Reagan saved him from the dire consequences of the IranContra scandal, he added.
Can we expect a similar leap in empathy and popularity for Trump?
The country then wasn’t nearly as polarized and divided as it is now. The first visitor outside of his family and close advisers permitted to see Reagan was Rep. Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, the liberal Democratic House speaker. O’Neill went straight to Reagan’s bed, grabbed the president’s hand and kissed his head. Then the speaker knelt and together they recited Psalm 23 —“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”
Such a moment almost surely could not happen today — and not only because the president is in quarantine, the victim of a pandemic he has spent months minimizing and wishing away.
If he is well enough, we can ponder whether Trump will act with humility, dignity and grace, like Reagan did.
Trump’s actions after his diagnosis also contrast with Reagan’s. He remained silent for several hours on Twitter, his main channel of communication, since he announced his diagnosis just before 1 a.m. Eastern time in Washington. He also skipped a conference call Friday with governors.
Reagan’s White House, on the other hand, wanted to show that the president was fully in command, even from his hospital bed. The morning after he was shot, after a fitful night in the recovery room, Reagan signed a bill to block farm subsidies to dairy farmers.
Though the administration did not invoke the 25th Amendment by transferring power from an incapacitated Reagan (he was unconscious in surgery) to the vice president, George H.W. Bush essentially ran the government until Reagan was discharged from the hospital after 12 days.
Even so, the White House bungled aspects of its response. A White House press secretary couldn’t answer basic facts about the president’s condition. Al Haig, the secretary of state, famously mangled the line of succession. Though doctors initially downplayed the seriousness of the injuries (Reagan actually came within a minute or two of dying), they eventually provided a fairly complete and detailed analysis of how they treated the president and his prognosis for recovery.
Despite those missteps, the public was willing to trust Reagan’s doctors and his young administration.
There, too, the contrast with the Trump administration is clear. The current White House has squandered its credibility through nearly four years of repeated falsehoods and disinformation.
Reagan grew from the experience. In his diary, he wrote he prayed for the man who shot him and the day fundamentally transformed the president’s worldview. He believed his life had been spared by God to reduce the threat of nuclear war.
Do we expect Trump to empathize more with those who caught the virus? To date, there’s little evidence of that, but Reagan’s example might stand Trump and his White House in good stead.