We Must Not Forget that Trump and Reagan Both Became President by Accident
I should state up front that this column can be added to the "failing to remember history, doomed to repeat it" file. There is nothing new, of course, to the admonition that it is important to understand history. Although that is indeed an old point, it nonetheless needs to be repeated again and again, because too many people forget. And because history inescapably gets longer, while attempts to rewrite it -- especially in this era of pathological lying from the Oval Office -- are part of an ongoing disinformation campaign, the specifics matter.
As I will argue below, there is an alarming kind of retroactive triumphalism about Trump's 2016 and 2024 electoral outcomes that is disconnected from reality, a triumphalism that we can also see in contemporary commentary about Ronald Reagan. Those two accidental presidents are now treated as all but inevitable by people who have simply decided to impute their own spin on what "the American People" said with their votes in those elections. That is dangerous, especially in our current moment.
It has long been clear that people across the political spectrum and throughout the various media ecosystems are intent on changing the story of the 2024 US presidential election. Although I quite enjoy late-night comedian Seth Meyers's political satire, I am sad to report that he is still stuck on the idea that Donald Trump won for an affirmative reason, that is, because voters trusted Trump to improve the economy. In a Dorf on Law column this past December 19, I transcribed this bit from a Meyers "Closer Look" segment:
(6:34 mark): "Voters gave Donald Trump a second term because they were mad about the economy, and they were hoping he would fix it, despite the fact that last time he was in office, he broke it."
(7:01 mark): "The reason voters gave Trump another shot is because he made it clear he wouldn't just bring prices down, he would do it ASAP."
(15:33 mark): "So why is Trump calling the central issue of American political life -- the thing that got him elected, and the number one things voters say they care about -- a hoax?"
(16:41 mark): "Voters gave Trump a second term because they believed him when he said he'd bring down prices, and now every poll suggests they regret it."
As I put it at the time: "That is a lot of confidence in a story that exists in people's imaginations but not in reality." I am also sad to report that Meyers now offers some version of that misreading of 2024 on a regular basis -- so much so, in fact, that I simply no longer even bother taking note of when he goes back to that toxic well. As I have argued many times, I understand why well-meaning people like Meyers think that this is a useful trope, because they can now use it to point out that Trump "broke his promises to the voters." But that does not make it any less dangerous.
Indeed, this tendency to credit why "the American people voted for Trump" has the additional defect of making it seem that the 2024 election was somehow not a toss-up. "Americans were overwhelmingly unhappy about the economy," and Trump won, which apparently all but begs us to conclude that "Americans overwhelmingly voted to return Trump to the White House." In my December 19 column linked above, however, I ran through the numbers and showed that Trump's win was anything but "sweeping" or "decisive" or any such nonsense.
Not only did Trump barely squeak by -- performing marginally better than in 2020 and 2016, but still a nail-biter of an election that looked until the last minute as though it was going to go to Kamala Harris -- but the Democrats minimized their Senate losses on an impossibly challenging map, and then even picked up a seat in the House. Yet there are people to this very day screaming at each other about the Democratic Party's "autopsy" and wringing their hands about how badly they did in that election.
The 2024 election was achingly close. (I will go back to the 2016 election later in this column.) It would have been better if Trump had never become President again, but his win was most definitely not definitive. Even so, I almost lost my mind when I read a column last Fall by The Guardian's Marina Hyde, who is this generation's Maureen Dowd -- and no, I do not mean that in a good way (as if there is a good way to mean that). Hyde, who is based in the UK, was talking about Trump's attempt to sue the BBC, but hold on tight to see where she goes with it:
Were Trump to sue the BBC in our courts, the US president’s case against would presumably be based on the notion that he – a convicted felon found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records in a hush money case; a civil case loser found to have sexually abused a woman and been ordered to pay her $83m – had reputational damage done to him by the editing of a clip in a documentary that aired in another country, which no one noticed at the time, shortly before he won a landslide presidential election victory. Righto.
What? Is that what even snarkily anti-Trump commentators now believe? This kind of nonsense has seeped into the political discourse in a way that Trump and his enablers use to justify his depredations. He won big! Americans voted for all of this. Righto.
Trump benefited in 2024 from extreme sanewashing (note that my column in that hot link does quote a very good comment from Seth Meyers in that regard). More generally, Trump is getting a pass because of people's unwillingness to look at actual data to see who swung toward Trump from 2016 to 2020 to 2024. I will come back to that in a moment, but it is now time to talk about Ronald Reagan.
There is a generally good YouTube channel called "How Money Works" (HMW) that ran a co-produced piece earlier this year with the enticing title: "Why is One Man Always Blamed For Everything Wrong With America?" That one man is Reagan, and the 21-minute video comes with a thumbnail of a graph showing everything going wrong -- incarceration, wage stagnation (productivity contrasted with wages), inequality, and union membership -- starting just about when Reagan became President in January 1981.
The HMW video does have some virtues, although nothing stands out to make it worth watching. What is worth pulling apart is two elements of their story about Reagan: (1) How he became president, and (2) Why the economy improved during his two terms in office. The video's analyses of those questions are superficial at best, but the story is actually much worse than that, because it airbrushes and justifies Reagan in ways that echo today in how Trump is being given a freebie even by his critics.
(1) The HMW video explains Reagan's win in 1980 by saying that he was an engaging speaker and that he was able to deflect claims that his policies were anti-worker by pointing to his stint as head of the Screen Actors Guild in the years after WWII. That is pretty much their entire story: likable guy who could win an argument. But that too-cute story completely misses two fundamentally important aspects of that election.
First, there is no mention at all that the Republican establishment was all but soiling itself when Reagan become the presumptive nominee in the Spring and Summer of 1980. And they had good reason to panic, because Reagan was simply a joke. People in the party were so worried about it, in fact, that they tried to draft former President Gerald Ford for a rematch against President Jimmy Carter. Their fear was that Reagan was so unhinged, such an obvious lightweight, and such a loose cannon that he would drag down the entire party with him. Ford declined the effort, mostly because it was too late by that point to derail Reagan's nomination, but that does not change the fact that the real Reagan was anything but the retconned version: the smooth, broadly acceptable bloke that the HMW video (and, to be clear, nearly every political commentator in the country at this point, no matter their ideological views) imagines.
Second, there is the rather huge gap in failing to emphasize the enormous impact of the Iranian hostage crisis on the Carter reelection effort. In particular, there is no mention of the allegation that the Reagan camp secretly negotiated a deal with the new Iranian revolutionary government to prevent the hostages from being released before Election Day in November 1980. Congressional inquiries later concluded that there was insufficient evidence to conclude definitively that that had happened, but it is fair to say that evidence does exist, including statements from people who were there.
But even if that were no conspiracy, the failure to focus on perhaps the only time in history that a foreign policy crisis arguably changed a US election is a rather serious error. Again, conveniently skipping over that part of the history makes it seem that "the American people wanted" what Reagan was peddling, which quite clearly was not the case.
(2) The HMW video then explains the Reagan economy by making brief reference to his tax cuts and some spending policies, concluding that those policies were something like adrenaline, that is, something that can be good for a short time and in small doses but can be deadly if overused. The narrator intones: "He inherited a genuine crisis and applied genuine solutions. Those solutions worked in the short term, and that short-term success was real. But those short-term solutions became permanent policy, and permanent policy created structural damage that has compounded over four decades."
It is obvious, then, that HMW was not writing a puff piece about Reagan. The problem is that their economic analysis is simply wrong, and in a way that matters greatly. Specifically, we hear nothing about what was in fact happening in those years. Carter appointed a monetary policy hawk, Paul Volcker, to be Fed Chair, and Volcker inflicted extremely high interest rates on the economy that voters hated in 1980 (again, Reagan's win was not about his supposed likability). Volcker also engineered a recession early in Reagan's first term that was the worst downturn the US had suffered since the Great Depression. When Volcker changed monetary policy soon thereafter, Reagan received credit for the recovery.
What about Reagan's tax cuts and spending increases? Were they not the short-term boost that HMW's video claims? No, because the tax cuts were heavily loaded at the higher end (shock: Republican tax policy helps the rich) and thus had virtually no impact on short-term economic performance, while his spending increases were mostly for military equipment (the "600-ship Navy") that also is not economically stimulative.
The story that the video tells, however, is that Reagan was a widely respected, likable guy who swept into power on his own merits and then dealt effectively with a crisis. We now are to believe that Americans wanted Reagan and received a good economic outcome, at least in the first few years. That allows Republicans now to claim that their hero is an all-time great, whereas his track record simply does not support that claim.
To bring this back to Trump, I suggested above that the now-conventional story about his first Electoral College win follows this pattern. Contrary to reality, we now hear that "people were alienated by bad trade policy," or whatever, so they chose Trump. Even leaving aside his popular vote loss -- which one might think would count toward figuring out what "American voters wanted" -- how could anyone fail to mention Russia or James Comey's last-minute interventions in that election? Even if Robert Mueller was unwilling to claim that there was a winnable criminal case for collusion between Trump and Putin, there is no doubt that what Russia did -- with our without coordination with Trump's campaign -- had an enormous impact on the election.
Moreover, Trump's opponent that year was Hillary Clinton, who had been so beaten up by Republicans and the press for the previous quarter-century that large numbers of Democrats and independents said that they would stay home rather than vote for her -- because they thought that she was obviously going to win big, even without their vote, against an obvious buffoon like Trump. And as I pointed out shortly after that election, "the Democrats had picked up six House seats and two Senate seats in 2016—contradicting the nonstop Democrats-as-losers meme that has become all but required in 2017 news coverage."
As they had with Reagan in 1980, in 2016 Republicans were sure that their primary process had misfired badly and had saddled them with an indefensible candidate who would harm their party. Circumstances conspired to allow two men who were widely considered to be unelectable to become President. And as I noted above, in 2024 the return of Trump was as narrow as possible, and with the winner having negative coattails (again).
So, are those who cannot remember the past condemned to repeat it? Yes, but it is worse than that, because even the people who oppose the Reagan and Trump agendas not only cannot remember the past but continue to convince themselves that the past was something entirely different. This leads to crazy things like Chuck Schumer making up a fictional couple that he "consults" about policy, but he has imbued his creations with Reaganite views and says that they voted for Trump.
It also means that Democrats in general are much too quick to say that anyone with a non-defensive-crouch policy agenda is UNELECTABLE. I will have much more to say about that in my column on Wednesday.
- Neil H. Buchanan