Trump, Reagan and the GOP Establishment

 

    

    Donald J. Trump is the most popular Republican president since Ronald Reagan. You may not like his mannerism, his attitude, his crudeness, whatever. The things he confronted head on was great for America, and the establishment, the old guard of the GOP, despises him in the same way they despised Reagan.
    Sure, they came around to Reagan after they realized the populist wave he was riding couldn’t be stopped. Then rode his wave for the next 30 years, but make no mistake, they did everything they could to try to destroy him before embracing him.
    In 1968 he so infuriated the status quo of the party by running a last-minute campaign for president against the establishment backed Richard Nixon, they called it an “insurgent” campaign. In 1976, Reagan took his “insurrectionary” and “divisive” primary campaign against incumbent President Gerald Ford and was blasted by the old guard of the GOP as an extreme nut who wanted to keep the Panama Canal, a voodoo economist who thought cutting taxes would lead to balanced budgets and thought spending more on defense would lead to less conflict with peace through strength.
    They later blamed Reagan for Jimmy Carter winning the presidency. The status quo of the party never liked Reagan much until his second term.
    Now, today, they are trying to revision Reagan’s image. They say things like Reagan didn’t mix things up or call people out like Trump does. He was a unifier not a divider. He was refined and polite. He would be appalled by Trump’s rude and rough approach.
     It’s not true. This is all politics. Reagan took the Democrats and the GOP head on, never backed down, and beat them. Do not buy and fall for this history revisionism that the proper Republicans are the polite ones, willing to work across the aisle. Reagan wasn’t a uniter, he was a fighter, and if he had to get down in the gutter with these people, he went there.
    Go study a history lesson of the 1966 California gubernatorial campaign. You’ll find it was one of the nastiest in California history. Reagan used the term “welfare bums” and promised to clear them out. As governor, during the Of the People’s Park protesters, Reagan declared, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.”
    Reagan won by damning the Democrats’ expansion welfare dependency and promising to crack down on criminals and cheats and spared no feelings criticizing the judicial system as “soft on crime.”
    Reagan’s delivery of the message might be more polished than Trump’s, but they have more in common than the power brokers of the republican party want you to believe.
     This we need to walk across the aisle, shake hands, cooperate and compromise strategy of the status quo polite group think intellectual elites of the conservative movement should have proved by now that is not how you win anything. Bob Dole, loser. John McCain, loser. Mitt Romney, loser. It may be the way to have yourself highly thought of by others in DC circles, but it’s not how you win anything. And when the old guard of the establishment does win, America doesn't, unless you like open borders for cheap labor, bad foreign trade deals like NAFTA that destroyed middle class manufacturing jobs or endless wars that enrich the military industrial complex.  

    Reagan and Trump demonstrate how you win. You fight. You fight for America first.