As Donald Trump’s four year reign over our collective consciousness comes to an end, many have asked the question: What’s next for the Republican Party? And many have, in turn been quick to point out that another, more dangerous, more effective Donald Trump is surely on the way. The argument is that, because Biden largely won through overwhelming disdain for Donald Trump, a less bumbling and more likable Trump successor, one that could garner a far more passionate base than a middle of the road candidate like Biden, is set to take power come the next election. And the supposed danger of such a hypothetical presidency is that, Trump was largely kept in check by his own stupidity, a man who had failed upward his entire life continued to so in the Oval Office, but a more suave, politically inclined and, well, intelligent Donald Trump V2 could pose a much more serious threat to the left, one never seen before.
But we have seen this very thing play out before. Ronald Reagan was Donald Trump before Donald Trump was Donald Trump, and he was even better at it than Trump was. You don’t have Donald Trump without Ronald Reagan, but where you might expect a later presidency to be a refinement, a step forward from a former one, but what the Trump Administration really represented was the crude idea of the Reagan one. Where Trump more explicitly went after progressives, calling them rioters, and going as far as to suggest authorities kill them, Reagan was, dangerously, more subtle in his approach. The War on Drugs.
Make no mistake. The War on Drugs had nothing to do with Drugs. It had everything to do with an assault on progressivism, a manipulation of anti-African American fears residing deep within the hearts of countless Americans. The War on Drugs was the War on the Left.
It’s easy to point out the myriad of flaws in Donald Trump’s presidency. There’s more documented instances of him being a complete idiot than perhaps any person in the history of the world- mostly through his well documented Twitter history. But Reagan’s war on the left was much more subtle one than Trump’s, something that reflected the Cold War he was waging at the same time. So when people say the next Donald Trump will be 10 times more dangerous than the one we have right now, I say we’ve already had that. At that point your’e not talking about the next Donald Trump. Your’e talking about the next Ronald Reagan.
I didn’t see this! Great concept!