The wheels of the bus go round and round. And with each trip the Fox News Channel prime time hosts, conservative radio’s talk show hosts, and the Republican Party on Capitol Hill, are aiding and abetting Donald Trump’s effort to drive the Obama presidency into the annals of obscurity. However, what these acolytes of Ronald Reagan are, in effect, doing is trampling the Reagan legacy into the ground – infrastructure bill not required.
The anti-tariff policy of Reagan and the Republican Party has been usurped by Trump as he obliterates a major tenet of the Reagan/Republican economic policy with the lie that the United States is receiving billions of dollars from China and the other countries which Trump imposed tariffs upon. Those billions of tariff dollars are being paid by American importers and passed on to American consumers in the way of higher prices. Even Trump’s formerly anti-tariff economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, admitted that it is Americans who are paying the cost of the Trump imposed tariffs. Yet the aforementioned hosts cannot bring themselves to tell their viewers and listeners this basic truth.
In his Oval Office farewell to the nation, Reagan’s critics would be quick to point out certain issues he left unsaid – race and civil rights being paramount. However, while pointing out what he felt were his administration’s successes, over his eight years, there was power in his overarching message. He said that freedom is fragile and needs protection with a “greater emphasis on civic ritual.” Yet the political party who can claim the last presidential winner of 49 states is hell bent on eviscerating the civic, as well as constitutional, right to vote on a selected segment of the American public. The new patriotism that Reagan felt he helped reclaim, “won’t last unless it’s grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge,” – both of which the current president sorely lacks, seems unable to grasp, and that his party lacks the faith and confidence that Reagan had in his message.
While admitting his regret in his inability to curb the deficit, Reagan was proud to point out America’s rise in exports as we “summoned the national will to knock down protectionist walls abroad instead of erecting them at home.” And because America is “still a magnet for all who must have freedom,” any walls should “have doors open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” A wall built to keep out endangered women and children who have traveled hundreds of miles on foot is an absolute affront to the Reagan legacy and an insult from those who claimed to support and idolize his presidential leadership.
But, nowhere does the conservative betrayal of the Reagan legacy echo more loudly than it does when the red phone rings in the White House Oval Office. After Part 1 of the Mueller Report, it should be amazingly frightening to the conservative talk show hosts and post-vangelical leaders, who continue to idolize the Reagan presidency, that deafening alarm bells are not ringing in their ears over Donald Trump’s suspiciously cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin. It is Putin who laments the collapse of the Soviet Union and has been wielding his autocratic power in Russia in an effort to recapture territory and return a power base to the Kremlin as a legitimate sphere of influence throughout the world. The very policy, the end of the Soviet Union, that Reagan spearheaded, with the aid of our NATO allies, was a rousing success. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” has always been the precursor to point out Reagan’s successful campaign to plunge the Soviet Union into obscurity. Whenever Reagan’s legacy faced opposition, his media supporters were quick on the talking point trigger of how the 40th president united Germany and slew the Soviet bear.
It is a virtual guarantee that faced with the intelligence that Russia hacked our political system, Reagan and Tip O’Neill would have been side-by-side making a joint statement and members of both houses of Congress would have spent their time on their respective floors castigating Russia and devising all manner of severe bipartisan punishment. But in three short decades, Vladimir Putin has taken under his wing, an American president making Reagan’s foremost foreign policy accomplishment seem politically naïve. Thus, the abject silence of Republican leadership in Congress and their media personalities as Putin’s foray into two Florida county voting infrastructures render no backlash or support for remedies.
Why is almost every GOP representative unconcerned about the unnatural hold that the Red Bear has on the 45th POTUS? Why are so many former Reagan boosters, in Congress and the media, accepting of such a dangerous pact and the Trump family’s admitted financial ties between them? And why are the Republican students of history blocking out the 1980s Reagan years? It is virtually inconceivable that it would be multiple business failure, accused sexual molester, and perpetrator of frauds, Donald J. Trump, with the help of the Republican Party and self-described conservative talking heads, who now show a fleeting allegiance to Ronald Reagan, would be the ones to trample on Ronald Reagan’s legacy and drive it into the forgotten ash heap of history, left shot to death on 5th Avenue outside of Trump Tower.
The Op-Ed Alternative 