Donald Trump is now our 45th president, and I can’t help but compare him to our 40th president, Ronald Reagan. Both men were derided as dangerous simpletons by the intellectual elite, yet both men successfully rode into the White House on a wave of populist anger at the corrupt cronyism of special interest groups and business-as-usual politics.
Both men also gave voice to the anger the people felt about that amalgam of federal agencies — aka government bureaucracies run by unaccountable bureaucrats — that keep insinuating themselves into our lives due to the arrogant belief, as Reagan once put it, that those enlightened bureaucrats can “plan our lives for us better than we can plan them for ourselves.”
That said, there are some worrying differences between the talents Reagan brought to the White House, talents that made his presidency a success, and those Trump will bring.
Leave aside Reagan’s long government experience and more temperate character, although those are important. Instead focus on the fact that Reagan had a consistent set of political principles and ideas about how to govern. Reagan’s conservatism, unlike Trump’s, was not recently acquired nor regularly abandoned. It was long-held and deeply rooted in the notion that the federal government is far more often the problem than the solution, and therefore it needs to be constrained and limited to those powers and responsibilities the Constitution gives it, including national defense, foreign policy, and working with Congress to establish policies, including economic policies, that will enhance the lives of the citizens.
Further, Reagan courted, and was supported by, a widespread organizational structure of conservative thinkers and policy makers at all government levels. Some joined his administration, some were in Congress, some in state government, while others worked at magazines such as National Review and think tanks such as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. There they promoted and defended the same conservative principles and ideas Reagan was putting in place. It was an army, with Reagan the commanding general, but with some first-rate officers and soldiers in the ranks.
Trump has little of this. While some of his Cabinet picks have been pleasant surprises, they serve at his pleasure, and must toe his line, and he has no consistent set of principles or ideas. Additionally, outside of his White House he has no organizational structure of the kind Reagan depended on. His relationship with most state governments and Republicans in Congress — House Speaker Paul Ryan foremost among them — is tenuous, and most conservative think tanks and publications are wary of him.
Lacking such support, Trump is, at present, essentially an army of one, which doesn’t bode well for conservatism in the battle for America’s future that has just begun.
