Photo: Ronald Reagan takes time
out for a lunch break during conference with some of his top aides in Los
Angeles, July 9, 1980.
Donald Trump yesterday announced the “Reagan
Alumni Advisory Council for Trump-Pence,” made up of 240 former Reagan advisors
who support Trump for President.
The first quote in Trump’s
press release, from Reagan’s attorney general Edwin Meese, begins like this:
“Many of us remember 1980, a time when, as today, America suffered from high
unemployment and even higher interest rates.”
In fact, the unemployment rate in
October 1980 was 7.5 percent. The unemployment rate today is 5.0 percent.
Interest
rates in 1980 were 15.3 percent. Today they are 3.3 percent.
The current
unemployment rate is so low that conservatives are loudly demanding that
the Federal Reserve raise interest rates to force unemployment higher. Current
interest rates are the lowest they’ve been in at least 55 years.
Meese provides a useful
public service by reminding Americans that Trump’s bizarrely obsessive
fantasizing isn’t an aberration for top Republicans. The GOP gave up on
this universe long ago, starting with Ronald Reagan, so it makes
sense that Reagan’s old staffers would feel right at home with Trump.
You could spend your entire
life cataloguing Reagan’s peculiar beliefs about the world, but here are
just a few:
In 1983, during
a ceremony for winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor,
Reagan told a story about a World War II pilot who chose to stay with
a trapped underling on a crashing B-17 rather than jumping to safety.
This didn’t happen in real life, but it did happen in “Wing and a Prayer,”
one of Reagan’s favorite movies.
In 1984,
while meeting with the prime minister of Israel, Reagan told him that he
had been part of a U.S. military unit that had filmed concentration camps
at the end of World War II. Moreover, Reagan said, he had saved a personal copy
of the footage to show to anyone who might claim the Holocaust never
happened. During the war Reagan lived in Hollywood and never left the U.S.
In 1985,
he claimed that apartheid South Africa had “eliminated the
segregation that we once had in our own country.”
In 1986,
after the U.S. had traded weapons to Iran in return for the release of U.S.
hostages in Lebanon, Reagan said “We did not — repeat — did not trade
weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.”
For Meese’s part, he
enthusiastically followed the lead of his boss. Just before Christmas in 1983,
he told the National Press Club that Ebenezer Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol”
suffered from “bad press in his time. If you really look at the facts, he
didn’t exploit Bob Cratchit. … Bob, in fact, had good cause to be
happy with his situation. … Let’s be fair to Scrooge.”
All of these examples are from
the truly essential 1989 book “The
Clothes Have No Emperor” by comedy writer Paul Slansky. It’s the best
resource there is if you want to know more — much, much, much more —
about the era when the Republican Party finally slipped the surly bonds of
reality.
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