Reagan Was a Democrat

The Reagans Built the Modern Political Con That Handed Donald Trump the Presidency

Ronald Reagan's parents were Democrats in a Republican-leaning part of Illinois, Dixon, a small river town in Lee County where the Reagan family settled in December 1920, when Reagan was nine.

Jack and Nelle Reagan's Democratic loyalty ran deeper than just voting. Jack Reagan had a grade-school education and worked as a shoe salesman, and after FDR's 1932 election, he was rewarded for his Democratic activism with an appointment as the local director of the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal relief program. That job, and one his brother Neil also got through New Deal programs, is the specific source of the gratitude toward FDR that Reagan carried the rest of his life.

Reagan's parents were also unusually progressive on race for their setting. At Eureka College, when two Black teammates were refused service at a segregated hotel during a football trip, Reagan invited them to stay at his parents' house in Dixon.

Not only was Reagan a Democrat, he was a progressive Democrat.

Reagan began shifting to the right gradually. In 1960, he supported the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon, while still registered as a Democrat, campaigning for Republicans from inside the other party.

"I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The party left me."

Reagan spent the 1940s learning what a camera does to a face. He signed with Warner Bros. in 1937, twenty-six years old, and made thirty films before shipping out in 1942, most of them B pictures, shot fast and forgotten faster. Poor eyesight kept him out of combat and placed him in the Army's First Motion Picture Unit at the old Hal Roach studios, making training films by day and sleeping at home most nights. The acting career never took off. What he picked up instead, without naming it as a skill yet, was the difference between a line that plays and a line that doesn't.

By 1947 he ran the Screen Actors Guild, a job with real leverage and no script. He negotiated contracts while feeding the FBI names of colleagues he suspected of Communist sympathies, then pushed through a mandatory non-Communist pledge for SAG officers and aligned the union with the studios against a more radical rival. The blacklist that followed destroyed careers on rumor and hearsay, and Reagan's guild helped give it cover. He was, at the time, a registered Democrat who backed Helen Gahagan Douglas for Senate and spoke against the Klan on the radio.

Nancy Davis came into his life in November 1949 with a story the two of them repeated for the rest of their lives. She said her name turned up on a blacklist by mistake, confused with another actress who shared it, and that she called the union president to fix it over dinner. Biographer Anne Edwards, working from SAG's own archive, found that the mix-up didn't actually surface until 1953, a year after the wedding. The real sequence started with Nancy asking producer Dore Schary's wife for an introduction. The Scharys arranged a dinner. Reagan and Davis married in 1952 with two guests present. The romance the Reagans sold to the public for the next fifty years was a script, written after the fact, and it worked because both of them understood how to make a fabricated moment feel real.

That instinct became a whole career. Reagan started getting booked to introduce other Republican candidates at California fundraisers, and the introductions began outperforming the candidates. In October 1964 he delivered "A Time for Choosing" for Barry Goldwater, who lost in a landslide weeks later. Reagan's standing rose from the speech anyway, detached entirely from the outcome it was meant to serve. He quit acting that year. Two years later he beat Pat Brown for governor, his first race for any office, running on lines that tested well and a biography that had been sanded down to fit them.

He lost the 1968 nomination to Nixon and the 1976 nomination to Ford, and each loss functioned as another rehearsal. By 1980 he had the character finished: the outsider, the plain-spoken defender of a country the professionals had ruined, a role built by two people who understood staging better than policy. He beat Jimmy Carter and carried his all-American character into the White House for eight years.

Every Republican president since Reagan has borrowed pieces of his character without building the whole thing. George H.W. Bush ran against Reagan's tax theory in the 1980 primary, calling it "voodoo economics." He spent eight years as vice president wearing it anyway. He campaigned on his own version of the pledge in 1988, "Read my lips: no new taxes," then broke it in office.

His son inherited the same yardstick without asking for it. Reagan called the Soviet Union the "evil empire." Bush called the countries backing terrorism the "axis of evil," a parallel his own aides pointed reporters toward on purpose. Reagan's former chief of staff told U.S. News that Bush governed "in bold strokes," the same language Reagan's team used about Reagan.

Trump borrowed the same architecture without the union card or the studio contract. Trump skipped most of the hoops Reagan had to jump over. He arrived in 2016 having never held elected or appointed office of any kind, becoming the only person to win the presidency without either a political record or military service standing behind him.

Their records in office diverge just as sharply. Reagan raised taxes three times as president, in 1982, 1984, and again in 1986, after campaigning as the candidate who would cut them, and he built a combative but functional relationship with Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill, striking deals on Social Security and tax reform that neither man wanted to make but both signed anyway. Trump's dealings with congressional Democrats produced no comparable partnership, and his first term ended in two impeachments rather than a bipartisan rewrite of the tax code.

Reagan left Hollywood with a modest fortune and no fraud litigation attached to his name. Trump's record includes six business bankruptcies and a $25 million settlement over fraud allegations tied to Trump University, a case resolved the same month he won his first term.

Reagan's 1984 reelection produced one of the largest landslides in American history, 49 states and 525 electoral votes against Walter Mondale, an eighteen-point margin nobody has matched since. Trump won the presidency twice, losing the popular vote by nearly three million in 2016 and winning it by 1.5 points in 2024, a margin among the smallest of any victorious candidate in more than a century.

Trump arrived to the White House already famous, already fluent in the difference between a line that plays and one that doesn't, and he ran as the outsider against a political class in exactly the shape Reagan had cut fifty years earlier. Reagan needed Nancy to write him into the role. Trump had already spent decades writing it himself, on television, under his own name, waiting for the country to cast him in it.

And they did.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

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