Dan Calabrese: Trump Will Still Be Trump, But He Needs To Learn a Few Things from Reagan
Ronald Reagan always had a smile on his face when he told the joke: “One of the most frightening things a person can say to you is, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
Reagan was the cheerful and determined critic of big government. In his mind, there was always a palpable tension between “we the people” and “they the government,” and there was no question Reagan was on the side of the people – even after he became the chief executive of the government.
Yet as much as Reagan distrusted government and doubted its ability to achieve what it promised with its many grand schemes, his appeal was based largely on the fact that he was more pro-people than he was anti-government.
Reagan embraced endless optimism about what the American people could do if the government would just get out of the way and let them do it. And when he had the opportunity to push government out of the way, the people largely vindicated his confidence in them.
Donald Trump should watch some of Reagan’s speeches, and do it soon. Trump’s basic beliefs about the country are not that far removed from Reagan’s – with a few notable exceptions like trade policy and a reluctance to embrace a muscular foreign policy – but his emphasis could not be more different.
In Trump’s mind, the most important issue to hammer home is the malevolence and corruption of the Beltway establishment. He is not wrong about that, but he’s also not speaking to the concerns of the average person when he drones on about it endlessly.
To the average person, the corruption of the FBI or the intelligence agencies – or even the media – is not a direct concern. The average person wants his or her job to be stable, his or her family to be safe from crime and to have assurances of basic freedoms.
I realize there are people who demand that the government either give them these things directly or guarantee that someone else will, but for the most part those people are not the undecided voters Trump needs to reach. Trump needs to reach people whose priorities are real, day-to-day concerns.
When it came to addressing such people and such concerns, Reagan was exceptional.
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It drove the left crazy because they were convinced he hated everyone but rich people. But in fact, Reagan understood how to speak to Americans in any walk of life and convince them that he believed in them and what they were capable of – because he did.
Trump has come close to this in his better moments, when he vowed that his presidency will ensure the forgotten men and women of this country will be forgotten no more.
It’s his best line and most enduring principle to back up his policies. It squares perfectly with his tax cuts, with his deregulatory policies and with his efforts to unleash domestic energy and private business investment.
But Trump doesn’t talk about this often enough. He doesn’t speak to the real-life situations of Americans and tell them that the reason he wants to get government out of their way is that he believes in what they can do — for themselves and for others.
And that’s a problem because Joe Biden drones on every day about how “families are reeling” and how he is going to make things better for them. He is going to do no such thing.
He is going to double down on the high-tax lockdown policies of Democratic governors and make it harder for companies to keep people employed. He proposes all this in the name of helping “working people” when in fact he’s killing their opportunities to improve their lives.
Trump needs to defend his policies in the language of a man who believes in common working people. He needs to explain that he’s empowering the private sector at the expense of big government because that’s where the people who drive this country operate.
And he has to point out that while Biden claims to support them — the working people — he proves otherwise with policy proposals that indicate he just wants people dependent on government.
Trump believes these things just as Reagan believed them. But Reagan presented them to the public in a way that made you feel hopeful and optimistic.
You can’t turn Trump into Reagan. There was only one Reagan, and Trump is always going to be Trump. But watching some of those videos sure couldn’t hurt him.
In fact, it might remind him of the true power of his ideas versus the ones of the man who wants to expand government at the expense of those forgotten men and women Trump wants to stand up for.
Or Trump may not get the chance to stand up for them much longer.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
