Is Trump Another Reagan?

On January 2nd, 1976, I arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, to begin teaching as a Visiting Professor of History. About a week after I arrived, Ronald Reagan announced that he was going to run for the Republican Presidential nomination to challenge Jimmy Carter’s attempt for a second term.

I was an East Coast guy, so all I knew about Reagan was that he was an ex-actor who had been Governor of California and was some kind of conservative politician aligned with the GOP.

When I began asking my faculty colleagues at Berkeley about him, this what I got: “He’s a nut,” said one. “He’s a complete idiot,” said another. “He’s crazy,” said a third. “He’ll start a nuclear war,” replied a fourth.

Nobody called Reagan a Fascist, nobody accused him of wanting to destroy American democracy. But the vehemence and anger that his name evoked in my conversations about him in 1976 were not very difference from how my liberal friends talk about Trump today.

What did we get from eight years of Reagan, who is usually referred to as a ‘revolutionary’ by today’s alt-right gang?

We got a tax cut which dropped the top rates by half, but in fact, many Americans who saw their tax bracket decline from 78% to 28% were already taking all kinds of deductions which gave them an effective tax bracket of under 40% anyway.

What nobody was able to duck, however, was the biggest, single tax increase ever passed by any President, the ‘adjustment’ of payroll tax…