Ronald Reagan: The Trump Dry Run
THREAD
Reading The American President by William E. Leuchtenberg, I was brought up short by the comparisons to be made. /1
THREAD
Reading The American President by William E. Leuchtenberg, I was brought up short by the comparisons to be made. /1
"Reagan spun one narrative after another that was palpably untrue.... 'He finds it next to impossible to say anything that is not in some crucial way untrue. It's not a credibility gap...it amounts to a reality gap' "--Jack Beatty (page 584) /2
"few Americans comprehended that the new president was not what he seemed to be. A man who identified himself with the nuclear family, he was America's first divorced president and was estranged from his children." (page 585) /3
"An advocate of 'Christian values,' he rarely could be found in a church pew on Sunday morning. He presented himself as someone who readily empathized with the working class, yet he hung out with super-rich West Coast buddies and despised the less fortunate." (page 585) /4
"No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill-informed....Frequently, he knew nothing about events that had been headlined in the morning newspaper." (page 586) /5
He was called "stupid" and "an amiable dunce"
"Aides also prepared scores of cue cards...'Every moment of every public appearance was scheduled, every word scripted, every place where Reagan was expected to stand was chalked with toe marks.' " (page 587) /6
"Aides also prepared scores of cue cards...'Every moment of every public appearance was scheduled, every word scripted, every place where Reagan was expected to stand was chalked with toe marks.' " (page 587) /6
"He spent nearly a full year of his tenure not in the White House but at his Rancho del Cielo in the hills above Santa Barbara." (page 587) /7
" 'Seen either in military or economic terms, the nation paid a high price for a president who skimped on preparation, avoided complexities and news conferences and depended far too heavily on anecdotes, charts, graphics and cartoons.' "--biographer Lou Cannon (p. 588) /8
Reagan as governor: "He especially alarmed members of his staff by flying into a rage if the press reported that he had changed his position on an issue, even when he undoubtedly had." (p. 591) /9
A former FDR man, "In 1952, Reagan began a transition toward conservatism that rapidly hardened. He never offered a remotely plausible explanation for his abrupt change, but a critical consideration was his resentment at the steep income taxes he had to pay" in H'wood (p.592) /10
By the 1960s he was saying things like "Unemployment insurance is a free vacation for freeloaders;" Medicaid patients were "a faceless mass, waiting for handouts;" the jobless just didn't want to work. (p.593) /11
Hiring Bad Help: David Stockman. DP Moynihan said "I have never known a man capable of such sustained self-hypnotic ideological fervor." Stockman was Mr. Supply Side Economics. (p.594) /12
Appointing Bad Help: officials "who in previous administrations might have been ruled out by concern over possible lack of qualifications or conflict of interest or open hostility to the mission of the agencies they now lead." (p. 603) /13
Even Worse: "Anne Gorsuch cut the EPA budget in half, urged drastic weakening of the Clean Air Act, and refused to enforce most regulations Congress had enacted....Gorsuch called on another foe of environmental regulations, Rita Lavelle, to monitor the Superfund" (p. 603) /14
"Reagan jettisoned an agreement Carter had reached with Canada" (p. 603) /15
"and even questioned whether industrial discharges caused acid rain." (p. 603) /16
