Whose Ronald Reagan?

When the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and two George Bushes met in Milwaukee this summer to renominate former President Donald Trump, it was the first time Republicans had chosen the same candidate in three elections since Richard Nixon and the first time since the GOP’s founding in the nineteenth century that it had ever done so in three consecutive races. A large percentage of Republicans—around half of them, according to surveys conducted during Trump’s presidency—now consider themselves more supporters of him personally than of the party generally. They have followed Trump to places once unthinkable in American politics, from going along with his assault on the legitimacy of the 2020 election to the abandonment of what were until recently core GOP principles, such as support for free trade. The current Republican Party is in essence the Trump Party, a takeover made all the more remarkable considering Trump’s past as a party-switching political chameleon, with little discernible ideology beyond a relentless focus on self-promotion, and a lifelong suspicion that the United States has been a perpetual mark on the world stage, getting ripped off by grasping allies and adversaries alike.

Trump’s current political dominance of his party, however, coexists with a somewhat more complicated reality. When the Pew Research Center asked Americans last year to name the best presidents of recent decades, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were almost evenly divided, between the 37 percent who favored Trump and the 41 percent who continued to believe that the honor should remain with Ronald Reagan, whose conservative revolution at the end of the Cold War reshaped Washington and his own party for a generation. The Trump takeover, it turns out, is not entirely complete.

If anything, Trump’s rise over these last contentious nine years has spurred a fight to claim—or rewrite—Reagan’s legacy, becoming a revealing proxy for the broader and still very much unresolved debate over the future of the GOP: Is Trump’s “America first” reboot a decisive break from the muscular internationalism of the Reaganesque past? Or has Trump, despite his embrace of market-distorting tariffs, fear-mongering about immigrants, and abiding skepticism of entangling overseas alliances, not genuinely altered the party’s beliefs much at all? In this 2024 election year, it seems as if every day one faction or the other invokes Reagan’s name in an effort to legitimize its view of Trump, whatever that may be. “Trump delivered on Reagan’s promises—he’s the true heir conservatives seek,” gushed the headline on a column in the New York Post pitching for a hagiographic new biopic about Reagan starring Dennis Quaid.

For a certain faction of die-hard Reaganites, generally drawn from the party’s most hawkish camp, the effort to define Trump as one of their own requires contortions of fact and argument to transform the ex-president, with his rants against free trade and cartoonish admiration for global strongmen including China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, into Reagan’s second coming. Recently, in these pages, Trump’s fourth and final national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, repeatedly invoked Reagan’s mantra of “peace through strength” in outlining a foreign policy agenda for a prospective second Trump term. Many of the policies that O’Brien suggested, however, such as support for Ukraine’s defending itself against Russia’s invasion, are unlikely to be embraced by a politician who praised Putin’s strategic “genius” in attacking Ukraine and who has opposed the billions of dollars in aid sent to Kyiv by the Biden administration. For O’Brien and many other conservatives, the Republican Party is and must always remain the party of Reagan. If the evidence suggests that this is no longer the case—well, then the evidence is just wrong.

Perhaps even more revealing, however, are those Republicans who openly reject Reagan as a model for the modern GOP. These are generally hard-line nationalist populists, such as Curt Mills, executive director of the magazine The American Conservative, who dismisses the 2024 wave of Reagan nostalgia as “boomer porn.” In a conversation with the author Jacob Heilbrunn, Mills argued that “Reagan got the big issues of the future wrong—foreign policy, trade, and immigration.” (Trump himself, it should be noted, is likely a subscriber to this point of view, once bragging to a team of pro-Trump authors that he ought to get credit for accomplishments that made him a president “far greater than Ronald Reagan.”) Trump’s MAGA movement, in this telling, is not the successor to Reaganism so much as it is a long-overdue repudiation of it.

Growing numbers of Democrats and Trump-critical Republicans now agree, which has led to some head-spinning scrambling of the ideological order. “Listen to President Reagan,” Leon Panetta, who served as CIA director and secretary of defense under President Barack Obama, told the Democratic National Convention in August in Chicago, invoking a 1984 speech delivered by Reagan at a D-Day commemoration in France: “Isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments.” The audience cheered the Reagan reference. Between that and all the American flag waving and spontaneous chants of “USA! USA!,” observers might have had a hard time figuring out which party’s convention they were watching.

When the former House Republican leader Liz Cheney endorsed the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, she made the case that she was doing so, not despite, but because she remains an old-style Reagan conservative. “There is absolutely no chance that Ronald Reagan would be supporting Donald Trump,” she said. John Lehman, who served as secretary of the U.S. Navy under Reagan, made the same point in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this spring. He argued that Trump was an “insult” to Reagan’s legacy rather than the heir of it, pointing in particular to Trump’s “naked admiration” for U.S. enemies such as Putin, his undermining of the NATO alliance, and his penchant for trash-talking the United States—a habit that would have been anathema to Reagan, whose stock-in-trade of gauzy patriotism and sunny optimism was captured in “Morning in America,” the 1984 campaign slogan with which he will always be associated.

So whose Reagan is the real Reagan? Enter Max Boot’s timely, authoritative, and admirably evenhanded new biography, Reagan: His Life and Legend. The decade that Boot, a national security expert who holds a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations named for Reagan’s UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, spent writing this book coincided with Trump’s ascent, during which the GOP rejected many of the tenets of Reagan’s Republicanism. In reaction, Boot quit the party, renouncing it in a 2018 jeremiad, The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right. He hardly mentions his evolution in the new book, but one has to wonder whether the project was at least in part a personal exercise aimed at examining his own hero worship of Reagan—which began in the 1980s, when Boot was a young and recent Soviet immigrant to the United States cheering the president’s confrontation with the “evil empire”—and whether it is still justified today.

Boot’s conclusion may anger all sides in the debate. Reagan, he acknowledges, was a pragmatic chief executive whose two terms at the twilight of the Cold War were notably successful. But he was also a far-right ideologue whose rise prefigured the Republican Party’s disastrous turn toward demagoguery and dishonesty in the Trump years. In a recent essay in The Washington Post drawn from his book, Boot wrote: “The real Reagan, I realized, was both much more ideological and much more pragmatic than most people understand. The former quality made possible his rapid political rise; the latter made possible his lasting success in office.”

AN UNPLEASANT FORESHADOWING

A decade ago, Boot would likely have spent more time admiring Reagan’s traditional Republican hawkishness; today, however, he is far more interested in the qualities that enabled Reagan to work across Cold War–era divisions in both domestic and international politics to get things done. This record is “a lesson,” Boot wrote in The Washington Post, “for modern-day politicians in both parties—and in particular for so many Republicans who regard ‘compromise’ as a synonym for ‘betrayal.’” This view of Reagan, of course, is not the reason for the continuing hero-worship of him in the GOP; many Republicans embrace a more simplified portrait of their idol as an unyielding Cold Warrior who hated communism abroad and government spending at home with equal fervor and almost singlehandedly brought down the Soviet Union with his Washington-­establishment-defying willingness to confront Moscow. (See just about every op-ed written by a Republican senator about China in the last decade.)

But Boot’s conclusion is a fair reading of the evidence about Reagan’s decision-making in office. In interviews I conducted with James Baker, who served as Reagan’s treasury secretary and influential White House chief of staff, Baker repeatedly recalled the advice that he would receive from Reagan when faced with a tough choice: “I’d rather get 80 percent of what I want than go over the cliff with my flag flying.” Baker told Boot something similar. “He was a true conservative,” Baker said of Reagan, “but, boy, was he pragmatic when it came to governing.”

Yet it’s also fair to remain skeptical on this point. As Boot makes clear, Reagan’s pragmatism coexisted with an almost Trumpian disregard for the facts, a disengaged management style that encouraged chronic infighting instead of careful decision-making, and a habit of embracing loony and impractical far-right ideas. Boot sees in these problematic aspects of Reagan an unpleasant foreshadowing of Trump—an “uncomfortable reality” for Reagan fans to admit. Not surprisingly, these tendencies, such as Reagan’s ill-founded conviction that left-wing rulers in Latin America constituted an imminent threat to the United States, led him into some terrible scrapes. At a lunch with Canada’s conservative prime minister, Brian Mulroney, Reagan was going on about how dangerous a leftist takeover of El Salvador would be for Texas. “Ron,” Mulroney said, “there’s not a chance these guys can challenge you anywhere.” If only Reagan had listened: the Iran-contra scandal, in which his administration secretly sold weapons to the Iranian government to free American hostages and fund rebels fighting Nicaragua’s leftist government, flowed directly from Reagan’s delusional views, even if Boot finds it credible that the president was so detached from the details of the scheme that it would have been hard for Congress to impeach him over it.

Overall, Boot’s book strikes a welcome tone of calm, fact-driven appraisal about a subject who continues to attract over-the-top partisan puffery. It is a nuanced portrait of Reagan for this very unnuanced age. As Boot reminds readers, despite Reagan’s forays into extremism, he was also the president who appointed the centrist Sandra Day O’Connor as the first woman on the Supreme Court, who took pride in cutting deals with congressional Democrats to reform the tax code and the immigration system, and who invested great power in his nonideological wife, Nancy, whose priority was wanting her Ronnie “to be a really good president,” as Reagan’s White House director of communications, David Gergen, told Boot.

Boot’s narration of Reagan’s political rise is particularly revealing, documenting the underappreciated extent to which the former Hollywood actor became radicalized by the conspiracy theories and anticommunist propaganda of the far-right John Birch Society, William F. Buckley’s National Review, and the conservative weekly Human Events, a source of so many of his erroneous claims that his adviser Stuart Spencer would later try unsuccessfully to get Reagan to stop reading it. Boot portrays Reagan as living in a sort of pre–Fox News information bubble that over the course of a single postwar decade, helped transform a liberal supporter of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal into one of Barry Goldwater’s most effective national surrogates. After Goldwater’s conservative revolution was swamped by President Lyndon Johnson’s victory in the election of 1964, Reagan became heir to the movement that would eventually sweep out the old Republican establishment and boost him to the White House in 1980.

Red-baiting and race-signaling were pillars of Reagan’s revamped worldview. In a landmark speech backing Goldwater in 1964 dubbed “A Time for Choosing,” Reagan told a national television audience that Democratic leaders were “taking the party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.” This was, Boot writes, “a grotesque slur” taken directly from the Bircher playbook. That did not matter to Reagan, who loved to scare audiences with fake quotes from Vladimir Lenin and other Soviet boogeymen and continued to use them regardless of how often he was told they were not accurate. One of his favorites: a supposed Lenin prediction that eventually a decadent and weakened United States would fall into the Soviet Union’s “outstretched hands like overripe fruit.” (The true source of that phrase, Boot writes, was the 1958 “Blue Book of the John Birch Society.”) Reagan kept repeating this fake Lenin line all the way up to and including in his 1990 memoir. The political tactics he adopted will feel painfully familiar to anyone watching Trump attempt to demonize his opponent in this year’s campaign as “Comrade Kamala.”

Like Trump, Reagan had a soft spot for even the crudest of right-wing dictators. As Boot documents, Reagan seemed to take personal offense at the way his predecessor Jimmy Carter criticized the human rights abuses of various U.S.-allied thugs and tyrants. In one episode, for example, Reagan promised the right-wing leader of Argentina’s military junta that he would get “no public scoldings and lectures” from the Reagan administration and offered a virtual endorsement of the junta’s so-called Dirty War against left-wing opponents, which led ultimately to the deaths of some 30,000 civilians and the torture of many more. In the minutes of an early National Security Council meeting cited by Boot, Reagan lamented the State Department’s focus on such abuses. “We must change the attitude of our diplomatic corps so that we don’t bring down governments in the name of human rights,” he said, adding, “We can’t throw out our friends just because they can’t pass the ‘saliva test’ on human rights.”

TO THE RIGHT, TO THE RIGHT

A staple of Reagan hagiography is praising the 40th president for a brilliant strategy to end the Cold War that he almost certainly did not possess. Boot takes a different tack, stating unequivocally that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, not Reagan, was the primary architect of the Soviet Union’s demise. Still, Reagan’s grappling with the challenge posed by the Soviet Union is central to the case for pragmatic political evolution that Boot wants to make about his presidency, and the book is at its most compelling when it shows Reagan struggling to reconcile his deeply held belief that the communist system was a global menace with his equally profound fear of provoking a catastrophic nuclear confrontation. It bears repeating again and again: the outcome was decidedly not preordained.

In recreating the uncertain environment in which the unlikely relationship between Gorbachev and Reagan developed in the 1980s, Boot does not stint in detailing the U.S. president’s halting course—refusing to impose sanctions to impede construction of a Siberian gas pipeline, for example, only to abruptly go ahead with them soon after; scaring the world with escalatory rhetoric about the Soviets while privately approving Secretary of State George Shultz’s efforts to open a back channel with the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin. As Boot notes, Reagan also cherry-picked intelligence to suit his views of fearsome Soviet military strength while disregarding internal U.S. government assessments that correctly warned of the implausibility of the “Star Wars” missile defense shield that he wished to build. Tragically, his dream of missile defense would eventually prove to be a deal-killer at the 1986 Reykjavik summit, where he and Gorbachev came closer than any U.S. and Russian leaders ever have to swearing off nuclear weapons.

It’s impossible to read Boot’s careful book and hold on to the seductive fallacy that Reagan possessed some sort of magic template for eradicating communist dictatorships or a playbook that could work again today if only applied with enough forceful resolve. And yet Reagan still manages here to come across as the hero that perhaps he was at first for Boot—an architect, if not the sole author, of the Soviet demise, who earned a place in history for helping “to peacefully end a 40-year struggle that could have resulted in nuclear Armageddon.” Boot writes:

That Reagan, who entered public life as a staunch anti-Communist in the 1940s and ran for the presidency in 1976 and 1980 as a critic of détente, was working so closely with a Communist leader was the ultimate tribute to his pragmatism. . . . And, unlike most ideologues of left or right, Reagan was willing to abandon the dogmas of a lifetime when it became evident they no longer applied to a changing world. . . . That transformation was all the more remarkable coming from a famously stubborn and ideological president who was approaching his [ninth] decade of life.

Of course, Reagan’s pragmatism does not explain what happened next to Russia—or what later happened, tragically, to the Republican Party. But his era in U.S. politics was also arguably the laboratory in which the pathologies of the present era were cooked up, a time when a new Republican establishment was born featuring people such as Baker, who would steer the United States to a post–Cold War period of sole superpower dominance, even as ideological insurgents such as Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan began to take over the GOP itself. These internal battles were already raging inside Reagan’s faction-ridden White House, though it is clear now that the shared imperative of standing firm against the Soviet threat was a constraint that, once lifted in recent decades, has allowed the party’s turn toward extremism. Reagan’s final speech to the nation was a love letter to immigrants as the source of U.S. greatness and the secret to why the United States is “unique among nations.” He even warned, as if anticipating the direction that his own partisans might take in the future, that if the United States ever shut the door on new citizens, its “leadership in the world would soon be lost.” Anyone who listens to that speech today would find it almost impossible to think of the contemporary Republican Party—whose leader spews hateful lies about dog-eating immigrants and vows to carry out mass deportations—as having any connection with its Reagan-era predecessor.

The debasement of the GOP is a story for another book, but there remains much in this one that speaks to the present challenges facing the United States. Russia’s return as a U.S. adversary is a reminder that Reagan, and many others in the hubristic few decades after his presidency, mistook the defeat of Soviet-style communism for an ideological victory that could permanently reorder geopolitics. Whether the Democrats can figure out how to deal with a resurgent Russia remains to be seen. What is indisputable, however, is that the Trump-addled Republican Party no longer has either the credibility or the aspiration to pursue Reagan’s vision for global leadership. Reagan the pragmatist might recognize the missed opportunities in such a moment; Reagan the ideologue might simply mourn a movement that has lost its way.