Reagan –> Trump

But first:

TOXIC POSITIVITY

I’m not the only one with the happy gene.  I couldn’t have said it better.  Happy belated birthday, Glenn!

And:

INFECTIOUS GENEROSITY

“The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading” — from the head of TED.  “If you want to help create a more equitable world but don’t know where to start, Infectious Generosity is for you.”—Bill Gates

And now:

Apparently, Deadpool and Reagan were the big Labor Day weekend movies.

Andy Borowitz refers to both as he asks, Who Created Trump?

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The new film “Reagan” tells the heroic story of how our 40th president transformed America into a shining city upon a hill and single-handedly slayed the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union.

For a more historically accurate moviegoing experience, I recommend “Deadpool & Wolverine.”

Let’s get real about Ronnie.

. . .

According to Reagan, the greatest environmental hazard wasn’t man-made: “Eighty percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees.” When he shared his theory about these toxic emissions during the 1980 presidential campaign, students at California’s Claremont College affixed this sign to a tree: “Chop Me Down Before I Kill Again.”

Does his anti-tree stance sound familiar? It should.

When Trump’s hand-picked candidate Herschel Walker ran for U.S. Senate in 2022, he slammed Democrats’ climate measures, alleging, “They continue to try to fool you like they are helping you out. But they’re not. They’re not helping you out because a lot of money, it’s going to trees. Don’t we have enough trees around here?” Walker’s comments were widely derided as cretinous, but I have another word for them: Reaganesque. “A tree’s a tree,” Reagan told a logging group in 1966. “How many do you need to look at?”

. . .

Ronnie’s contention that trees cause pollution, much like Trump’s that windmills cause cancer, might be charitably described as an alternative fact.  Reagan’s most legendary deployment of alternative facts, however, came during the 1976 campaign, in his broadsides against a character who became famous as the “welfare queen.” Much like Trump’s inflammatory narratives about rapists and murderers swarming across the southern border, Reagan’s stories about the queen blended fabulism and racism.

“There’s a woman in Chicago,” he told his reliably white audiences. “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four deceased husbands… And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.” (Perhaps fearing that his story lacked sufficient punch, he later upgraded the number of her aliases from 80 to 127.)

. . .

Reagan never explicitly said that the welfare queen was Black, but he didn’t have to. By referring to a welfare cheat in Chicago, a city with a large African American population, he was sending a message his white audience would have no trouble decoding. (Never mind that the vast majority of welfare recipients were, and still are, white.)

Unsurprisingly, Reagan’s tales of the welfare queen didn’t stand up to fact-checking. As the New York Times reported on February 15, 1976, the woman Reagan demonized “is now charged with using not 80 aliases but four. The amount the state is charging that she received from her alleged fraud is not $150,000 but $3,000.”

. . .

Those who argue that the economic hardship suffered by people of color under Reagan’s presidency was just a nutty coincidence rather than the inevitable result of racist policies should turn their attention to a 1971 phone conversation between him and then President Richard Nixon, who, always so helpful to historians, taped just about everything.

After the United Nations voted to recognize the People’s Republic of China, on October 25, 1971, members of the Tanzanian delegation danced in celebration. The confluence of a communist state attaining prestige and Africans being happy was too much for Reagan, who, in a rage, rang up Nixon. “Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan said. “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Ever the performer, the Gipper knew his audience; Nixon can be heard laughing uproariously.

Let’s close our discussion of Reagan and Trump with one very specific parallel: their predilection for scheduling campaign rallies at locations stained by racial violence.

In 2020, Trump planned an appearance for Juneteenth, the annual commemoration of the emancipation of slaves in the U.S. The place? Tulsa, Oklahoma, which in 1921 was the site of the race massacre that killed as many as 300 Black people. (After the rally’s announcement sparked an uproar, Trump moved the event one day later, and then had the audacity to claim, “I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous.”)

Forty years earlier, Reagan kicked off his general election campaign in a similarly notorious locale: near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the Mississippi Burning murders of the civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. As in his welfare queen tirades, he made sure his speech at the Neshoba County Fair, to an all-white audience waving the Confederate flags later favored by the January 6 rioters, included a time-tested racist dog whistle: “I believe in states’ rights.” Reagan’s triumphant march to Election Day had begun, with badges trumpeting his campaign slogan: “Let’s Make America Great Again.”

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