Reagan, Putin, And The Destruction Of The Modern Republican Party
The tighter Trump’s MAGA grip upon the GOP, the more Reagan’s influence has melted away.
For most of the last half-century, Ronald Reagan defined Republicans as the party of patriotic spirit, a bulwark of American democracy against authoritarian menace.
The 41st president contrasted our “shining city on a hill” with Moscow’s “evil empire.” Long after the demise of the Soviet Union, Reagan’s successor, George W. Bush, dedicated his presidency to ending tyranny through the spread of democratic traditions around the world.
This makes it especially hard for me to process the whipsaw that has placed the GOP and its leader in the opposite position: hostile to democracy, friendly to authoritarians, aligned with Moscow in its aggression against Ukraine.
Losing elections plainly has a lot to do with it. Watching Democrats win the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections has persuaded Republicans democracy is not their friend. With the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection, Donald Trump went to war against our democratic system.
The white conservative Christians who dominate the Republican base embrace the turn for related reasons. They’ve proven powerless to stop America’s evolution toward a more secular, diverse society that has broadened the sexual revolution by embracing LGBTQ rights.
By contrast, Christian nationalists find the crackdown by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin against gender transitioning and the elevation of “family values” over “non-traditional sexual relations” satisfyingly effective. And however libertine Trump’s personal conduct, he’s their strongman.
The Trump-Putin Bromance
Trump entered politics on Putin’s side to begin with. Russia put money in his pocket as a businessman, then covertly interfered in the 2016 election to help make him president.
He has returned the favors ever since. As president, Trump dismissed the superiority of American values and took Putin’s word over that of his own intelligence services. Most alarmingly, he advanced Moscow’s strategic objectives by weakening the NATO alliance that has shielded Europe from Russia since World War II.
When Putin attacked Ukraine in 2022, Trump hailed him as a “genius.” He has encouraged Russia to “do whatever the hell you want” to any NATO country not meeting the alliance target that members spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense.
The tighter Trump’s grip on the GOP, the more Reagan’s influence has melted away. In his telling, America represents a “failed nation,” a “screwed-up” and “very sick country.” The “enemy within,” as he calls domestic political opponents, poses a greater threat than Russia.
“Donald Trump doesn’t like America,” Sarah Longwell, a Republican-turned-anti-Trump crusader, told CNN last week. “These MAGA Republicans in that movement, they don’t like America.”
“Putin’s On Top of His Game”
Animus toward their own country achieves a core Putin objective as he works to restore global power at our expense. He calls America “burning from the inside,” while pouring gasoline on the flames.
“Russia relies on a vast multimedia influence apparatus,” Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a Senate committee last month. “The Russian government’s goals in such influence operations tend to include eroding trust in U.S. democratic institutions, exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the United States, and degrading Western support to Ukraine.”
Moscow has succeeded in spectacular fashion.
An upside-down American flag – which has become a symbol of the Stop the Steal movement and was seen at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection – flew at the home of far-right Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in early 2021. Nearly the entire party has embraced Trump’s lies about fraud in our electoral system. Since his felony convictions, vice-presidential hopefuls have competed in their denunciations of our legal system.
The House Republican majority blocked desperately-needed military aid for Ukraine for months. Though Speaker Mike Johnson ultimately relented, letting Ukraine aid pass on the strength of Democratic votes, most Republicans voted against it.
“Putin’s on top of his game,” GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama said earlier this year, insisting that his strike against Ukraine was merely a defense against NATO encroachment. He derides the democratically-elected Zelensky as a “dictator.”
“Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base,” House Foreign Affairs chair Michael McCaul, among the few still identifying as a “Reagan Republican,” said earlier this year.
Intelligence chair Mike Turner agreed: Some Republican rhetoric is “directly coming from Russia,” he recently said. After interviewing Putin, far-right media personality Tucker Carlson praised his sincerity and called Moscow “so much nicer than any city in my country.”
Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell are developing a private real-estate deal in Serbia slated to reportedly include a memorial to “victims of NATO aggression.” The Conservative Political Action Conference now holds conferences in Hungary, whose authoritarian government has become a model on the right. Trump hails Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as “a great man.”
How far have Republicans drifted? So far that when President Biden commemorated D-Day by invoking the triumph of democracy over “bullies” and “dictators,” prominent GOP voices decried it as an attack on Trump.
Others complained that Biden’s speech amounted to “plagiarism” of Reagan’s remarks on the D-Day anniversary 40 years earlier. Well, no one’s accusing Trump of that.
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This is where you are wrong, Mr. Harwood. This IS Reagan's influence! Trump is merely the more crass, white trash version of him but the paternalistic, authoritarianism and christian nationalist BS was always there.
Just to note, Reagan's successor was H.W. Bush and not W.