“You must not be old enough to remember what they said about Reagan in 1979.”
True. I was 18 and not particularly interested in politics.
I do remember going to visit a girl at her dorm room and she was more “sophisticated” than me. She was 17 and couldn’t vote so she told me I better vote against Reagan. I asked why. Her answer was Reagan will start a war. I was skeptical and told her I didn’t buy that. At the time I thought it didn’t matter. I didn’t buy in to whatever anti-Reagan scare tactics people threw out, but I didn’t support him. Nor Carter. I didn’t care about politics and didn’t vote.
As far as the analogy to Trump today. I don’t buy Trump is like Reagan. Trump was in his mid thirties when Reagan ran and a business man, yet didn’t support him ever. He even belittled Reagan in his famous Art of the Deal book. I saw the light and went fully conservative when I was 29. Reagan became conservative well before he ran for governor and even more so before he ran for President. He had a track record both in and out of office as a conservative for decades. Trump has nothing remotely similar.
I’ve seen old videos of Trump talking about the Japanese buying up everything. So he has been a nativist for a long time. That does create a track record of a sort on some of his issues.
“I do remember going to visit a girl at her dorm room and she was more “sophisticated” than me. She was 17 and couldn’t vote so she told me I better vote against Reagan. I asked why. Her answer was Reagan will start a war. I was skeptical and told her I didn’t buy that. At the time I thought it didn’t matter.”
Trump is Trump, but the hatred is there Reaganesque.
For what its worth there was a lot of damage done to Business in the 80s under Reagan. Changes were made on how much companies had to save for pensions. With the revaluations, companies became take-over targets for their overfunded pension plans, bought, raided, loaded with debt and broken up/sold. Think Mike Milken & junk-bond buy-outs. Most of those good companies died when they couldn’t service debt payments. Hurt a lot of people’s retirements.
Bottom line, nobody is all good, or all bad (except the current occupier).
If all Trump does is break the GOP and medical monopolies, he will be viewed as a great president.