Were you aware of it? Some of the most effective slogans of Donald Trump are not his. The password “we will get peace through strength”, and the (rhetorical) question asked the voters “Are you better today, or four years ago?”, Employed in the Trumpian 2024 countryside to dig a moat against the outgoing president, Joe Biden are not new at all. They date back to the accuracy in 1980, when – repeated for months – they put their wings to another great republican candidate for the White House: Ronald Reagan, who was then president from 1981 to 1989. Even the very successful slogan “Make America Great Again”, That with the acronym “sorceress” has filled millions of caps and t-shirts, and which today is the symbol of the 47th President of the United States, has nothing unpublished: it was Reagan, closing the Republican convention that 45 years ago He had just chosen him as a candidate, to use the phrase “Let’s Make America Great Again”. Trump only canceled the two words at the beginning.
These curious parallels between Ronald & Donald have passed quite unnoticed. Perhaps because the two presidents, at first sight, have different personalities. So much the public image of Trump is aggressive and rough, as that of Reagan was affable and friendly, almost “Berlusconi” (online survive the videos of some of the thousand jokes that he used to tell from the stage). Donald is a protectionist, while Ronald was a free trade proponent. Trump does not have what is said an expansive vision of civil rights, and is hostile to illegal immigration, while Reagan in these fields was much more secular and liberal, even if it must be remembered that he was an anti-abortionist, and in his time not There were neither the excesses of the “Cancel Culture” nor the follies of “gender” or Woke ideology, and the migratory thrusts did not have the threatening charge of today. Yet the similarities between Reagan and Trump are intense. Not only because both, before entering politics for the republican right, had been democratic voters. And Ronald was detested by the left, at home and in Europe: from the beginning of his presidency he was ridiculed and mistreated by the progressive media, to then be described as a dangerous reactionary. Just like for a decade it happens to Donald.
Furthermore, both presidents have escaped a fatal ambush. On March 30, 1981 Reagan was hit on the street in Washington by one of the seven pistol shots exploded by John Hinckley: the bullet pierced his lung and stopped 25 millimeters from his heart. And Trump on July 13, 2024 survived the shotgun shot 150 meters away from Thomas Matthew Crook in Butler’s rally, Pennsylvania: the blow wounded him to an ear, touching his skull for only 15 millimeters. Out of the hospital, although neither of them had ever shown great devotion, both Reagan and Trump said they were “saved from the hand of God”. The stories of the two presidents also overlap in the economic and fiscal field. The “Reaganomics” of the eighties and the 2017 “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” took place the same goal: to stimulate growth by reducing tax pressure. Reagan cut the rates, reducing the maximum from 70 to 28 percent. In the first term, Trump reduced the rate for companies from 35 to 21. Results? The American GDP accelerated at an average of 3.6 percent for all eight years of Reagan, and at 2.6 percent in the first three years of Trump, from 2016 to 2019 (in 2020 Covid broke out, and that point The world stopped); At the end of Reagan’s mandate, the occupation had increased by 3.5 percent, and 4.7 at the end of the Trumpian three -year period.
It is internationally, however, that the connections between Ronald and Donald are more evident. Reagan took the United States in his hand after the disasters caused by Jimmy Carter, the democratic president who in 1979 had allowed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and had not caught the risks of the Ayatollah revolution in Iran, background and prologue of decades at all, of Islamic terrorism. In 2016 Trump arrived at the White House also thanks to the unforgivable errors made on the international chessboard by Barack Obama, who after having announced in 2009 the “American hallway worldwide” had withdrawn the United States from Iraq and the Middle East, leaving Campo Free to Russia, Iran and above all to Jihad, so much so that it allows the birth of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and the global explosion of terrorism. Trump today has returned to power also thanks to the disaster left by Joe Biden, who after devastating the image of the United States with the inglorious withdrawn from Afghanistan, in August 2021, renounced military deterrence: thus allowed the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the expansion of China’s strategic ambitions.
Biden’s inconsistency, then, allowed what seventy years of American foreign policy had always averted: the anti-west alliance between Moscow and Beijing. Reagan was not understood in all its greatness except when, after eight years of direct contrast to the Soviet Union and after having increased military spending by 54 percent between 1981 and 1985, he was the one who won the Cold War and to do fall “the empire of evil”. Trump used his first four years by playing an immense economic and military match against China, the great strategic opponent of the West.Today he must face the new “axis of evil” between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, enlarged to Iran. An almost more difficult game than that of old Ronald.
