Free Republic

In 2016, there are 14 Republican presidential candidates for whom Ronald Reagan is both the benchmark for conservative values and the lodestar of conservative ideas. There’s also one who wrote, in the second to last year of Reagan’s presidency, that he had been “so smooth, so effective a performer” that “only now, seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile.” The gadfly was Donald Trump, writing in his book The Art of the Deal. But it wasn’t just a glancing blow; to promote the book, Trump launched a political campaign that tore into Reagan’s...

ARE YOU crazy about Barack Obama? Do you fervently hope the next president of the United States will be as similar to the current president as possible? Then Donald Trump may be the candidate for you. Of all the candidates running for president, the one who most resembles the incumbent is not Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or Martin O'Malley. To be sure, the Democrats' policy views largely overlap with Obama's. But when it comes to attitude and self-image, it's Obama and Trump who are birds of a feather. Everyone knows about Donald Trump's bottomless narcissism; this is a man...