I am done with it, I have had enough and I need to get this off my chest.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I am thankful that “moderate conservatives” have decided to join the fight to protect our democracy; their help is welcome and necessary.
But I am also sick and tired of how the term “moderate” is used because it’s dragging us further to the right.
Nikki Haley is NOT a moderate! Her views on women’s rights, national security, immigration… not one thing she believes is in line with the vast majority of Americans. The same goes with Liz Cheney. Brian Kemp is the most conservative governor in Georgia’s history. The list could go on and on.
The only thing that makes members of the media think these people are “moderates” is that these GOP members meet the absolutely lowest minimum bar of believing the results of the 2020 election.
I am all for Nikki Haley staying in the race to damage Trump. I think Liz Cheney did excellent work on the J6 committee, and Kemp deserves praise for standing up to the pressure campaign by Trump and his henchmen.
My problem is that these folks are talked about as “Reagan Republicans”…. when I hear that term I want to scream. So let’s talk about what being a “Reagan Republican” really means for a minute, shall we?
- Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign with a dog whistle to white supremacists in the South
Black America remembers Reagan much differently than apologists who claim him as a politically conservative figure who stood above the racist din of some of his more unseemly supporters.
As the Republican nominee for president in 1980, Reagan staged an Aug. 3 rally at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, an event that was weighted with racist symbolism. Neshoba County was the site of the brutal murders of the black activist James Chaney and white civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman.
- Reagan actively worked with a foreign power to influence the outcome of the 1980 election.
New York Times published a blockbuster story that said two prominent Texas Republicans flew across the Mideast in the summer of 1980 for secret meetings with regional leaders to urge them to tell Iran to keep the U.S. hostages in Tehran until after the election that pitted GOP candidate Ronald Reagan against then-President Jimmy Carter.
<snip>
All this is powerful evidence that the Reagan campaign did — as has been alleged for decades — strike a deal with the Iranian government to prevent the hostages from being released. While that has never been proven, what’s known beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the Reagan campaign was deeply worried that Carter might get the hostages out before November and thereby give a big boost to his prospects.
- Reagan (probably) broke the law with Iran Contra (he was shielded enough that no charges were ever brought… but come on….)
… after the Democratic sweep of congressional elections in November 1982. First Democrats passed the Boland Amendment, which restricted CIA and Department of Defense operations in Nicaragua specifically; in 1984, a strengthened Boland Amendment made support almost impossible. A determined, unyielding Reagan told National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, "I want you to do whatever you have to do to help these people keep body and soul together."
- Reagan made sure to appoint an Attorney General that was going to be very friendly to his administration
When Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1980, he, too, wanted a political operative sitting in the attorney general’s chair. The post-Watergate reforms embodied in EIGA didn’t give him pause. After serving as the president’s chief White House counsel from 1981 to 1985, Edwin Meese III moved over to DOJ accompanied by some accumulated baggage, and after a year of fierce opposition in Congress, he was finally confirmed on a divided vote.[41]
Meese was a California crony of Reagan, serving as the then-governor’s chief of staff from 1967 to 1974. He was active in the national election campaign and chaired Reagan’s presidential transition team. Meese’s fingerprints were on everything the President handled.
So close were they that David Gergen described Meese as the President’s “alter ego,” and Reagan’s biographer cited Meese as Reagan’s “geographer.
- Reagan was obviously very hostile to unions and the working class
… on August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 striking air traffic controllers and barred them from ever working again for the federal government. By October of that year, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or PATCO, the union that had called the strike, had been decertified and lay in ruins. The careers of most of the individual strikers were similarly dead: While Bill Clinton lifted Reagan’s ban on strikers in 1993, fewer than 10 percent were ever rehired by the Federal Aviation Administration.
- Reagan ignored a national health crisis and in fact joked about it behind closed doors
When the HIV/AIDS epidemic began in the 1980s, the Reagan administration's first reaction was chilling: It appeared to treat the epidemic as a joke.
In a new documentary short by Scott Calonico called When AIDS Was Funny, posted by Vanity Fair, audio of press conferences reveals Ronald Reagan's press secretary, Larry Speakes, and members of the media joking about the HIV/AIDS epidemic — which they called "gay plague" — and laughing about one of the reporters potentially having it.
- Reagan had serious mental issues while in office and his aids once raised the possibility of needing to invoke the 25th Amendment
The president was acting strangely. In the wake of a scandal about his illegal dealings with foreign powers, White House aides felt he was so “inattentive and inept” that a memo sent to the chief of staff raised the prospect of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
The president was Ronald Reagan, who was dealing with fallout from the Iran-Contra scandal. His chief of staff ultimately dismissed the possibility of using the 25th Amendment to remove him, but the incident is one of the few cases in American history in which White House staff seriously suggested it as an option for removing a president from office, based on his ability to perform the job.
- Reagan had numerous scandals, many ending in criminal convictions
James Watt, Reagan's Secretary of the Interior was indicted on 24 felony counts and pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor. He was sentenced to five years' probation, and ordered to pay a $5000 fine.[13]
Phillip D. Winn – Assistant HUD Secretary. Pleaded guilty to one count of scheming to give illegal gratuities;[14] pardoned by President Bill Clinton, November, 2000[15]
Thomas Demery – Assistant HUD Secretary – pleaded guilty to steering HUD subsidies to politically connected donors. Found guilty of bribery and obstruction of justice[14]
Deborah Gore Dean – executive assistant to Secretary Pierce – indicted on thirteen counts, three counts of conspiracy, one count of accepting an illegal gratuity, four counts of perjury, and five counts of concealing articles. She was convicted on twelve. She appealed and prevailed on several counts but the convictions for conspiracy remained.[14]
Joseph A. Strauss, Special Assistant to the Secretary of HUD, convicted for accepting payments to favor Puerto Rican land developers in receiving HUD funding.[16]
Silvio D. DeBartolomeis convicted of perjury and bribery.
Michael Deaver, Reagan's Chief of Staff, was convicted of lying to both a congressional committee and to a federal grand jury about his lobbying activities after he left the government. He received three years' probation and was fined $100,000 after being convicted for lying to a congressional subcommittee.
Lyn Nofziger Reagan's Press Secretary was convicted on charges of illegal lobbying after leaving government service in Wedtech scandal. His conviction was later overturned.
Rita Lavelle, an administrator at the EPA, misused Superfund monies and was convicted of perjury. She served three months in prison, was fined $10,000 and given five years' probation
Anne Gorsuch Burford, the controversial head of the EPA. Burford, citing "Executive Privilege," refused to turn over Superfund records to Congress.[23] She was found in Contempt, whereupon she resigned.
Melvyn Paisley, appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1981 by Republican President Ronald Reagan,[27] was found to have accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes. He pleaded guilty to bribery and served four years in prison.[28]
James E. Gaines, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy, took over when Paisley resigned his office.[29] Gaines was convicted of accepting an illegal gratuity and theft and conversion of government property. He was sentenced to six months in prison.[30]
Victor D. Cohen, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, was the 50th conviction obtained under the Ill Wind probe when he pleaded guilty to accepting bribes and conspiring to defraud the government
Mario Biaggi and Robert García sentenced to 2+1⁄2 years for the Wedtech scandal.
- Reagan cozied up to right-wing evangelicals and brought them center stage in our political discourse
During the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan and the evangelical conservatives engaged in a very public courting ritual. Evangelicals had entertained possible GOP alternatives to Carter since at least 1979. Options abounded— ranging from right-wing purist Philip Crane of Illinois to early front-runner John Connally of Texas—but Reagan, long a darling of conservatives in general, was an especially compelling choice. By the time Moral Majority executive director Robert Billings signed on as a Reagan campaign adviser, the deal was pretty much sealed.
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On social issues, at least, the pew trumped the country club. “It’s right down the line an evangelical platform,” gushed one Republican at the Detroit convention. Reagan struck an explicitly religious note in his acceptance speech (whereas Carter made no direct mention of God in his), merging established modes of civil religion with a newer rhetoric of antisecularism: “I’ll confess that I’ve been a little afraid to suggest what I’m going to suggest. I’m more afraid not to,” declared the nominee. He then paused. “Can we begin our crusade joined together in a moment of silent prayer?”
- Reagan had one of the lowest approval ratings for any president while he was in office
Reagan’s approval rating was 41 percent; after the Iran-Contra scandal was revealed, Reagan’s approval rating stood at 46 percent. His approval rating for his entire presidency was lower than Kennedy’s, Eisenhower’s and even Johnson’s, and at times he was one of the most unpopular presidents in recent history.
- Reagan was against protecting the environment
Carter, in his State of the Union Address the year the [White House Solar] panels were installed, presented an ambitious plan to put America on a clean energy path: 20 percent of energy from renewable sources by 2000. Part of his idea was to go far beyond simple hot water solar collectors and direct government research funds towards the development of photovoltaic cells, the kind that could put energy into the grid.
<snip>
A top Reagan official “felt that the equipment was just a joke,” the panel-installer Szego recalled to The Washington Post, “and he had it taken down.”
- Reagan instilled in American’s the idea that they couldn’t trust the government
Ronald Reagan said "Government isn't the solution to the problem, government is the problem.”
- Many Americans viewed Reagan’s policies as favoring the wealthy
The recession, which has been termed the "Reagan recession", coupled with budget cuts, which were enacted in 1981 but began to take effect only in 1982, led many voters to believe that Reagan was insensitive to the needs of average citizens and favored the wealthy.
- Reagan presided over a downturn in the economy that was accompanied by high unemployment for his entire term
Prior to the [2008] recession, the deepest post-World War II economic downturn occurred in the early 1980s. According to the accepted arbiter of the economy’s ups and downs, the National Bureau for Economic Research, a brief recession in 1980 — lasting only six months — and a short period of growth, were followed by a sustained recession from July 1981 to November 1982. The unemployment rate hovered between 7% and 8% from the summer of 1980 to the fall of 1981, when it began to rise quickly. By March 1982 it had reached 9%, and in December of that year the unemployment rate stood at its recession peak of 10.8%. The jobless rate slowly receded over the next few years, falling to 8.3% by the end of 1983 and to 7.2% by the 1984 presidential election. The unemployment rate did not fall below 6%, however, until September 1987.
- By the end of his second term, Reagan stopped holding briefings and answering questions from the press and instead only spoke with friendly news organizations
The televised White House press conference, a fixture of the presidency for 27 years and a major forum for the public to judge presidential performance, has been virtually abandoned by President Reagan.
Reagan has limited his formal White House press conferences to one so far in 1987 and only two since the Iran- contra scandal surfaced almost a year ago.
Meanwhile, his aides have been devising alternative means for the President to communicate with the public, such as one-on-one interviews with favored commentators and news organizations, and are considering experimenting with press conferences in which live television coverage would be barred.
- Reagan was a known liar who made up stories
Other examples abound: During a 1983 Congressional Medal of Honor ceremony Reagan told a story about military heroism that New York Daily News columnist Lars-Erik Nelson wrote never happened. Nelson had checked the citations on all 434 Congressional Medals of Honor awarded during WWII. The scene Reagan described did appear, however, in the 1944 film A Wing and a Prayer. Larry Speakes’ response? “If you tell the same story five times, it’s true.”
- Reagan even made up stories about his past to make himself look good
Yet Bush's self-serving revisions cannot compare with the fantastic recollections of the late Ronald Reagan, whose veneration by Republicans was never diminished by his bizarre utterances. In November 1983, he told Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir during a White House visit that while serving in the U. S. Army film corps, his unit had shot footage of the Nazi concentration camps as they were liberated. He repeated the same tale to Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and other witnesses. Reagan had indeed served in the Army and worked on morale-boosting movies for the War Department. But he had done so without ever leaving Hollywood for the entire duration of the war.
Please go back and look at that list above while thinking about Trump. Every item on that list has a direct connection to Trump’s actions in the run-up to the 2016 election and over his term in office.
There is a DIRECT CONNECTION between Reagan’s actions and the rise of Trump!
So, the next time someone wants to tell you how great Reagan was and that they wish today’s GOP would go back to being “moderate Reagan Republicans,” remind them of this list and how in many ways, Reagan was Trump before Trump. Reagan may have did it with a smile, but he wasn’t much different than the modern GOP.
