Reacting to the rise of Donald Trump, National Review’s Rich Lowry recently called on the Republican Party to get over its inordinate attachment to Ronald Reagan and his legacy. He suggests Reagan’s heirs must devise new policies to broaden the GOP’s appeal, and (implicitly) take down Trump.
Meanwhile, such conventional Republican candidates for president as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio still lovingly invoke Reagan’s name nearly a quarter of a century since he left office. In Rubio’s words, it is “time for the children of the Reagan Revolution to assume the mantle of leadership.”
By this he means, of course, people like himself, and not his nemesis Donald Trump who has a history of supporting Democrats, and can therefore be assumed not to be a “movement conservative,” and therefore, not a Reaganite.
Moreover, the “children of the Reagan Revolution” revile Trump for his opposition to the things they love the most—open borders, fast track trade deals, and military intervention overseas, which they habitually imply Reagan would have supported.Well, I worked for Ronald Reagan, and Reagan stood for none of those things.
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The establishment is in a dither over Trump lest the rebellion he is leading presage the end of everything it holds most dear—open borders (paving the way for the disappearance of the old United States and its replacement by “the world’s first global society,” in the words of the late publicist Ben Wattenberg), our endless series of optional, illegal wars that bear scant relation to any discernible US interests, the subversion and overthrow of foreign governments, including secular ones in Moslem countries that protect Christian minorities, and wretched trade deals that enrich the oligarchy while leaving the rest of the nation in the lurch.
Meanwhile, sovereign debt is $20 trillion and we have $200 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
Memo to Rich Lowry: the GOP’s problem is not Reagan and his legacy—it is the noxious brew of policies it is wedded to.
Still less is the party’s problem Trump—our only political leader who understands that we cannot go on like this.In focusing like a laser on establishment policies millions of Americans find intolerable—open borders, fast track and endless wars—he has become their tribune. That is why he is winning. And that is why I suspect that if my old boss Ronald Reagan were with us now, he would not be averse to the prospect of a Trump victory in November.
