Reagan, Trump Differ in Substance, Style

It has been nearly 40 years since Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency, and more than 30 since he left office—nearly as long as the interval between Franklin Roosevelt’s death and Reagan’s First Inaugural. In 2020, half of America’s voting age population have no memory of Reagan. But many of the Reagan Administration’s younger alumni are still present today, some in prominent positions, such as Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Clarence Thomas. Michael Barone observed that the high-water mark of the New Deal realignment occurred in the decade after Roosevelt’s passing, when Democrats extended their political dominance to the other party under President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican who governed within the New Deal’s horizon. Likewise, Reagan’s most enduring legacy might be the Republican ascendancy in the 1990s when the GOP took the House for the first time in 40 years and extended its electoral success down to state and local offices, especially in the previously Democratic “solid South.”