Did Reagan pave the way for Trump? 'You can trace the linkages,' says biographer

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

67% : "Both Reagan and Trump demonstrated the power of personality to shape the Republican party in their own image.
59% : "The first and most obvious is that both men were television hosts - Reagan on General Electric Theater, one of the most popular shows of the late 1950s and early 1960, and Trump on The Apprentice, one of the most popular shows of the 2000s and 2010s.
56% : "It's possible to imagine maybe there will be some charismatic, transcendent individual in the future who might have much more moderate views than Trump does and, if so, that person could easily gain ascendancy over the Republican party.
50% : "Ultimately, Boot argues, Reagan paved the way for Trump.
48% : Boot comments: "Both Reagan and Trump beamed into people's homes so that people assumed that they knew them, that they were like a friend but, in many ways, they were falling for the image rather than the reality.
46% : You can trace the linkages and see that despite the huge differences between Trump and Reagan, there are also various resemblances and similarities.
46% : You can argue that acclimated the Republican party to the fire hose of falsehoods that you see from Trump.
45% : This is what Reagan's neighbours were actually up to and the town actually even had segregation, even though it wasn't in the south.
44% : But he was practically like a political science PhD compared to Trump because he was actually interested in ideas.
42% : 'I don't think you can just say, wow, Trump arrived from Mars,' says Max Boot"Understand this about immigration," Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives and a staunch Democrat, said in an interview on HBO earlier this month.
42% : Just as Trump mishandled the coronavirus pandemic, Reagan had a devastating blind spot when it came to Aids, despite the efforts of scientists such as Anthony Fauci.
36% : "Both Reagan and Trump were populists who reviled Washington, though the former did not refer to it as "the deep state", and both used the campaign slogan "Make America great again".
35% : It's also possible that a rightwing demagogue who's as crazy as Trump but even more effective could be the future of the Republican party.
32% : "In Reagan: His Life and Legend, Boot acknowledges the personal and political differences between Reagan, born in 1911, and Trump, born in 1946.
32% : Boot comments: "He certainly did not engage in the openly racist appeals of a George Wallace or Trump for that matter but he certainly used race-neutral, coded language that people understood, talking about law and order, talking about we can't allow our streets to turn into a jungle, talking about welfare queens, that infamous episode in the 1980 election where he spoke at the Neshoba County Fair
31% : Then who's vice-president, Jerry Lewis?"But Reagan was in a different league from Trump, who once used a black Sharpie marker to alter an official hurricane map and suggested injecting bleach as a cure for Covid-19.
27% : "Clearly the Republican party has evolved in ways that Reagan could have never anticipated and yet I don't think you can just say, wow, Trump arrived from Mars and there was no relationship between what he's saying and doing and previous decades in the Republican party," Boot argues.
18% : Trump is now well to the right of Reagan.
12% : "A generation later, Trump dispensed with Reagan's dog whistle and replaced it with a bullhorn, deploying blatantly racist stereotypes in pursuit of the same goal.
9% : There was a lot more intellectual substance with Reagan than with Trump, even though Reagan was also accused of being a lightweight.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.