From Reagan to Trump

Donald Trump flew to Mexico City on Wednesday to try to act as a president might. Then he flew back to Phoenix to speak as a demagogic candidate for president would.

It was all by ambitious and cynical design.

One of Trump’s needs, if he is to have a chance in the presidential race, is to hold on to his primitive base with continued nonsensical pronouncements on the actually declining problem of illegal immigration—a border wall, the tab paid by Mexico, mass deportation.

At the same time, he needs to signal to center-right mainstream Republicans that he actually may not mean those utter impracticalities, and that he can, when called upon, comport himself in such a way as to seem presidential, or almost so.

You could almost hear the Breitbart News flamethrower who now manages Trump’s campaign, Steve Bannon, telling the candidate that he had to cling in a speech in Phoenix to all of that old populist-right business about walls and sending illegals home.

And you could almost hear the more conventional Republican pollster and consultant, Kellyanne Conway, telling Trump that, if he did that, he needed to balance it by finding a concurrent opportunity to send a kinder, gentler, more conventional and presidential-seeming message to white college-educated suburban and female Republican voters.

As it happened, Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto had invited both major American presidential candidates to come down and meet with him. So Trump hauled off and flew to Mexico City, talked privately with the president, then came out to one of those two-podium, two-leader stages common to real American presidents and other world leaders.

And Trump said, among other conciliatory things, that he and the Mexican president did not discuss Trump’s vow to make Mexico pay for this supposed wall between the countries.

The Mexican president later told reporters that the wall-payment issue indeed came up and that he told Trump that Mexico would not be paying for any wall.

You would think that Trump’s primitive base would despair of his international cowering, of his conciliatory retreat to the evasive mush of politics and diplomacy as usual. But, you see, Trump was preparing to serve them their red meat in a few hours in Phoenix.

In that venue, speaking to a crowd of excited white people, Trump vowed again to build the wall and make Mexico pay. And he said he would deport “criminal immigrants” on his first day as president.

You could take that to mean only illegal immigrants who are charged with crimes. Trump would be happy if mainstream Republicans thought he meant that. Or you could take that to mean that all undocumented persons are here criminally, and thus would be deported. Trump would be happy if his base thought he meant that.

Straddles of that ambitious sort, meaning two-pronged messages based on the location from which they’re sent and the directions they’re intended, are common in politics. They’re cynical, yes, but the deft politicians can perform them with hardly anyone noticing.

Trump is not deft. And he’s trying something more brazen than talking compassionately about the salvation of Social Security and Medicare while in Florida, and then talking boldly about entitlement reform while in Wyoming.

Being faux-presidential in Mexico City and a wild man hours later in Phoenix, and hoping people don’t notice that you’ve presented entirely different versions of yourself and your message within a few hours … that’s much harder.

H

ere’s how one does something similar more effectively: Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire, then met amiably with Mikhail Gorbachev, then took a stroll in Moscow and called what he saw a police state, then smilingly shook hands on a treaty with Gorbachev, then came back to the United States and said “trust, but verify.”

Thus Reagan took a hard line against the Soviets while working cooperatively with them, but at no time did he say anything that minimized or made an outright lie of anything else he’d said.

Reagan never seemed quite so brilliant as history now reveals him in the context of comparison and contrast with this contemporary beast we call Trump.

There is one other thing that Reagan did that stands in contrast with Trump: Reagan signed legislation granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants living and working in the country and otherwise staying out of trouble, and who agreed to come forward.

I’m reminded again of the time the Pope County Republican Women invited me to speak to their annual Reagan Day celebration. They required of me only that I say something nice about Reagan.

So I said Reagan was a lot better than the Republicans who came after him.

That’s never been so true as this very moment.

From Reagan to Trump—that’s the 30-year deterioration of the American Republican Party.