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Reagan's plan to 'make America great again'
00:38:10
Phil Tinline explores why Ronald Reagan's presidency was a pivotal moment for the United States – and the extent to which we can draw parallels between the country during his 1980s tenure and today
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Interviewer
So good, so good, so good.
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. The phrase Make America Great Again is indelibly associated with President Trump. Yet a very similar version of the slogan let's make America Great Again was in fact used by his 1980s predecessor, Ronald Reagan. What can this parallel tell us about the United states of the 1980s? And does drawing comparisons between the two reveal anything about the US Today? Author and documentarian Phil Tinline explored these questions in a recent BBC Sounds program called Ronald V. Donald, and he spoke to Matt Elton about what he learned.
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Interviewer
Phil, thank you for being with us today. We are talking about a time when a US President was associated with the phrase Make America Great Again and the US Economy was very much in the spotlight. Can you to Start fill us in on which president we're talking about and the use of that slogan, which I think may come as a surprise to some listeners.
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Phil Tinline
Yes, we are talking about President Ronald Reagan who won election in 1980 and then won elections with a spectacularly big majority in 1984, where he won every single state by bar his opponents home state of Minnesota and Washington D.C. and he used this slogan which is subtly different from Make America Great Again, but is obviously essentially the same. In the 1980 campaign the slogan was let's make America Great Again. And some people have drawn attention to the slightly more collegiate, slightly warmer version of that than the imperative Make America Great Again. And as far as I know, no one shortened it to MAGA in the course of the 80s. Maga obviously is a very particular kind of. And the red hat and all is very particular to now. But no, no sense that America had taken a wrong turn or was in decline. And that there was a golden age in the past that it was imperative to get back to and possible to get back to was very much part of Reagan's pitch. And then once we got to the 1984 election and his inauguration, his second inauguration 40 years ago in beginning of 1985, there's a sense, at least from the Reagan campaign's messaging that they have achieved that it is morning again in America. They've taken America back to this golden sort of redawning of its greatness.
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Interviewer
And we've alluded to there some of the comparisons with the present situation and we might come back to that towards the end of our chat. Before we do, I want to get into this pivot, this moment where America was seen as, as you've put it, having made some wrong turns and was trying to get back on the correct path towards dawn, towards morning. Let's talk to start with then about the backstory to this. When Reagan becomes president for the first time at the start of the 80s, what is the self image that America has and how does that feed into the campaign that Reagan set out to make?
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Phil Tinline
So the sort of deeper context for this is that the America that emerges out of the Second World War is suddenly a superpower. And then it has pretty much two decades of economic growth. It is an astonishingly optimistic, hopeful, confident country. And that lasts, as I say, through to the second half of the 1960s. And then as these things tend to go, what goes up to some extent must come down. And there are a series of brutal and sometimes humiliating traumatic shocks to that self image of this confident country. Now we should Also say that the great confidence and sort of splendour of America in the 1950s and 60s was particularly brilliant if you were a straight white man. And you don't need me to unpack in detail the massive exceptions to that for what was a majority of the population. But nonetheless that feeling was real and was politically very important. So then you have first and foremost the Vietnam War. Reagan first runs for the presidency to be the Republican candidate in 1968 off the back of his very hard line clampdown on student protest as governor of California, sending in helicopters against protesters in Berkeley at one point, although that may actually have been after he stood for election. But he was known as this real kind of hard man at that point. And the context for that is increasing anger amongst young people in particular about the Vietnam War.
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Phil Tinline
But then as the years go by, the increasing sense that America is effectively losing it's losing a war to a communist army of peasants. Now it's not quite that simple because that army is backed by China and the Soviet Union with huge amounts of materiel and so on. But even so, that sense that they are being defeated by communist peasants is not good for America's sense of self confidence. And then as you go into the 70s, partly as a result of the war, the economy is beginning to struggle as inflation and so on. And then like many countries, certainly like Britain, through the course of the 1970s, it hits really serious problems, this phenomenon of stagflation, both stagnation, unemployment and inflation at the same time, which is not meant to be economically possible. You have the oil shock in 1973 and so on. And then on top of that you have Watergate. You have the sense that the President is a crooked. And this again eats away at this sense that in 1960 Nixon had run against Kennedy and Kennedy only beat him by a whisker. And possibly there was a little bit of cheating involved, although it wasn't crucial to his victory quite. But the idea that that guy from 1960, the loser from 1960, wins in 68, wins big in 72, but did so by criminality again really eats away. And then you have when Jimmy Carter becomes president in the latter years of the 70s, this may actually start under Gerald Ford as well, who replaces Nixon. But you have a series of committee hear looking at the Kennedy assassination, but also looking at what the CIA has been doing. Illegal things the CIA has been doing. So talk about brainwashing experiments. You have the FBI being revealed to have this program called cointelpro where they were illegally spying on and subverting radical organizations which had every right to do what they were doing, provided it was peaceful under the First Amendment. And so there's a whole set of ways in which America had seen itself as being one thing and it's being forced to see itself as something else. And the final kind of aspect to this is Jimmy Carter saying to Americans, we need to acknowledge that there are limits. There are limits on growth, there are limits on what we can do with our economy. There should be limits on our ambition. And I've always thought this is something which is seen as fundamentally violating America's sense of self. Right. America is meant to be. You can be anything. The American dream is if you dream big enough and you dream hard enough, you can be that thing, you can be that person. And that's essentially what Reagan comes in and says. He says this in his first inaugural. There should be no limit on dreaming heroic dreams at the middle of a sort of economic crisis, effectively. So that's the offer that Reagan makes, is freedom from limits. There's one other thing he does which is that earlier on, as I say, he ran for president in 1968 and he ran again in 1976. And until that point, he is much more of a sort of economic fiscal hawk. He's much more about balancing the budget. But then he discovers these ideas, particularly from a guy called Arthur Laffer, about how if you cut taxes enough, yes, it will mean that government borrowing will go up in the short term, but it will unleash such entrepreneurial vigor and creativity that it will pay for itself fairly quickly. And so when he runs in 1980, not only is he running on a kind of you dream big, no limits, but he's also doing that in specific fiscal terms. And Carter is effectively, we might say, to the right of Reagan on the economics. In some ways.
- [09:37]
Interviewer
How big of a feeling was this that the nation had taken a wrong turn or that there was something chafing against how America should really naturally see itself?
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Phil Tinline
I mean, I think it's quite a widespread feeling. You can see it in the culture. You know, you can see it in the movies people want to go and watch. You can really see this turn if you watch Hollywood movies from the late 70s into through to the mid-80s of a sense of sort of inevitable depression and a kind of ironic sadness and a sort of despairing contempt. Sometimes there's a lot of scenes in kind of messy, dirty, litter strewn streets and you know, all of that taxi driver that kind of thing, Dog Day Afternoon, you know, and eventually the image that Hollywood starts presenting back to America from about 1982, 83 and particularly by the mid-80s, is a much less realistic, a much more sunny, a much more fun, a much more teenage version of itself. And I think that's maybe one way of thinking about how, you know, because Hollywood is not reality, but it has its finger up to some extent on the pulse of its customers. That's one way that I think you can see the broad sweep of that sense of depression with the small D that America got itself into by the end of the 70s.
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Interviewer
And the Hollywood link is interesting, of course, because Reagan was a figure known primarily in the past through the film industry. Let's talk about him as a person. How was he regarded when he first ran for president at the end of the 70s, the start of the 80s?
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Phil Tinline
The first time he's the party's candidate is in 1980, as you say, he's a primary candidate to become the candidate of the party in 68 and 76. Now that's his first time he runs. There's an article in Harper's Magazine which I think is in 1976 called the candidate From Disneyland. Now, actually, Disneyland and Hollywood are not the same thing, but if you're sneering from a distance, the point stands, I suppose. But Reagan is a very, very interesting sort of a Hollywood figure because actually he was a trade union leader. He is the only trade union leader ever to become President of the United States of America. Now, once he became president, he then very successfully hammered patco, the air traffic controllers union basically broke it. But he had been the head of the Screen Access Guild. He'd also been quite left wing. The director, Don Siegel, said that when he met him on a film called Night on Tonight In, I think, 1949, he thought he was a communist. Now, he was never a communist, but his dad had been rescued. His dad was essentially the town drunk in the 1930s in Illinois and had been rescued by the New Deal. He'd become a kind of New Deal rep. And that had sort of saved him. And Reagan, by his own description, was a bleeding heart New Deal Democrat. And what's really striking is that in the mid-80s, even at the height of his sort of Reagann ness, as we would think of it, he's still defending fdr. FDR is still someone that he reveres. It's Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society that he wants to reverse. But no, he was never an A list star. But his Hollywood career was often mocked. He was sort of teased about at press conferences candidate for Disneyland. He would be asked questions like, are you just auditioning for the role of an actor? Even in 1968, one of his fellow actors said, I think it was called Dan Blocker said, I understand the difference between my role and what I'm really like in real life. But Reagan seems to confuse the two. So there's an awful lot of snobbery and mockery about this. Actually, of course, I think the fact he was an actor was manifestly one reason he was such an amazing orator and such a fantastic communicator. But no, he's a much more interesting Hollywood figure. But none of that seems to cut through. He's just mocked for being sort of froofy, which I think is just ahistorical and unfair. He was a highly political guy. Another thing that he did in 19, late 1940s was, was impassioned radio broadcasts against the Ku Klux Klan. We forget this, but there was a sort of at least a worry about a resurgence and to some extent in reality, a resurgence of far right activity in America after the war, particularly before you get to the 50s, like really far right activity. And Reagan does these impassioned broadcasts against it. And so he was politically much more imaginative, much more interesting, and had a much more checkered past than, you know, he's an actor would ever allow you to think.
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Interviewer
And given some of this sneering, was there surprise when he was elected to office?
- [13:36]
Phil Tinline
Well, I think it was pretty clear that Carter was in pretty serious trouble. I mean, you know, he does this famous broadcast relating back to what I was saying about limits, where he talks about a crisis of conf. And there's a sense that America, both literally in terms of its energy supply, doesn't have enough energy, but also is wilting a little bit. And that Carter sitting there in his cardigan, kind of rather embodies it. It becomes known as the malaise speech, even though he didn't use the word malaise. So, no, I don't think that there was necessarily huge shock that they won. I mean, you also had the precedent of Thatcher winning in 79 here, which I don't think was irrelevant, just as you had Brexit just before Trump, which again, there was a kind of a sense of precedent. So, no, I don't think so, but I do think once it actually happened, people thought, oh goodness, we now have this very unusual figure. If you look at the pasts of presidents that had gone before, they had much longer political careers. Although we do again, forget this is one of the huge Differences between Reagan and Trump is he had been governor of California for eight years. That is not an insignificant job. And California is bigger than many countries. There's a bigger economy than many countries. So there was that sense. And I think that perhaps partly smoothed out, smoothed the path and allowed him to sort of push some of the more silly sneering to one side.
- [14:44]
Interviewer
I alluded at the start to the fact the economy was a big deal during Reagan's first term. How big a problem was it that Reagan had inherited?
- [14:54]
Phil Tinline
So in 1979, so this is the year before the campaign in earnest. Inflation hits 11% and there are attempts to drive it down with high interest rates. This is the kind of Carter fiscal conservatism I was talking about. But that leads to recession, as it did here. By the end of 1982, unemployment on the basis of that has crested 10%. So it is pretty serious. And what happens very crudely is there is a rebalancing of who matters in the economy. You have tax cuts and you have welfare cuts you do not have, which is relevant to where we are now, cuts to entitlements, to Social Security and so on. There is a sense, and this is brutally partly on the basis of who the voter demographics most affected are you doing probably don't want to take the fight to seniors, but taking the fight to very crudely working class people and perhaps disproportionately black people is something where there feels like there's more political leeway. Also, it's easy to make the case against welfare than it is against something, a system that people have paid into. You can see the reaction currently early 2025, to the notion that Social Security might be under threat. But no, there's a definite rebalancing of who is seen to be driving America forwards at this point, which I think is a term that's never really been reversed ever since. That, in a way, is a pretty epochal shift. And by 1984, you know, if you are one of the people who is, you know, winning in this economy, life is looking better. The economy is, is growing. And by 1984, this is helped by falling oil prices. But the economy's great 7.2%, you know, imagine that. Now, there is a broad sort of feeling by the 1984 election campaign that it's. For many people, it's worked. Consumer goods, electronics in particular, are kind of symbolic of that. There's a pulling back of antitrust regulation and there's a boom in mergers and acquisitions on Wall street, which is generating wealth for at least some people, but there are also groups in society who are losing out. There is a greater inequality.
- [16:58]
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Interviewer
N rakuten.com During Reagan's first term, military spending jumped by a third. We should talk about the wider political military, a wider geopolitical situation. What was the situation during Reagan's first term and what is interesting about the specific way in which he handled it?
- [19:03]
Phil Tinline
We tend to think now the Cold War as beginning from roundabout when Churchill makes his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri about the Iron Curtain descending across the continent of Europe in 1946 and that lasting right the way through to the Berlin Wall falling. You know, another metaphor of division and a literal form of Division in 1989. But actually there are at least three really distinct phases to this. There's the phase that runs through, true to broadly, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, which feels extremely dangerous. Quite often there are crisis upon crisis, the huge lurching shifts in the geopolitics. Then you have this quite long period of what is called detente, which lasts for much of the 60s and 70s where, you know, there are still serious tensions, there's still the Prague Spring being crushed and so on, but it doesn't feel like it had felt around the time of the Korean War, for example. But then at the end of the 1970s it's starting to feel tougher again. One of the huge things in this is the invasion by the Soviet Union of Afghanistan in 1979, which is absolutely galvanic for people on the American right. There's a real surge of energy on the American right, a sense that we have to tool up, we have to be ready to push back against this. And you know, some of those attitudes are already there before the invasion of Afghanistan. But you know, again, we should say that what the Carter administration is doing does to some extent presage what happens once Reagan comes in. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's Secretary of State, is no pushover. He is a Cold War hawk. He has a Polish background and he has a very strong sense of the Soviet Union as what Reagan later called it, an evil empire. So that is the kind of context you start to get in the early 80s, an intensification of that, partly because of Reagan's military spending. But there's also a sense that it's very hard to make out what the Soviets want. They have this sort of geriatric leadership around Leonid Brezhnev and so on. And in 1983 you have this famous crisis, able Archer, where there's a sort of military exercise and this misunderstanding about what's, you know, what's really going on. And looking back, it looks like we came very close to nuclear war. However, there is something else happening too. If you read through Reagan's diaries in 1984, he is actually also very keen to find a way to talk to the Soviets. Not to capitulate, but to engage. And he says at one point it's very difficult to do this because they keep dying on me. Because Brezhnev dies and is replaced by Yuri Andropov, former head of the kgb. He's then replaced by Chinenko. I remember watching this as a nerdy 10 year old and I think Chinenko is still in place, I think by the time that Reagan wins in 84. But then you have actually the protege of the ex head of the kgb, Andropov, but this character Mikhail Gorbachev, who is course of very, very different figure, not least generationally, he looks like he's going to be in for more than 18 months. He's not just going to keel over. And so there is a sense that in the second term, Reagan is able to engage with Gorbachev, who is going to remain alive, and that they can start to get somewhere, which indeed, to some extent they do. But it's an interesting dual kind of policy, an interestingly ambiguous policy. And this actually is one way that there is a sort of rhyme with Trump in some ways, although there's also differences. The phrase that Trump supporters would use, a couple of them used in the radio documentary that I made, which was people who had worked with Reagan too, a phrase that they felt was both Reagan's and Trump's, they would say, is peace through strength. So if we rearm sufficiently, if we put a sufficiently strong public posture up, that brings us the leeway to negotiate deals which will allow us to get somewhere. But the really striking thing about Reagan is actually he was really quite radical. His bargain from Max Boots says that he was more radical than peaceniks in some ways about this. He wanted to get rid of nuclear weapons and he obviously doesn't, but he gets somewhere along that. So again, as with his politics, as with Hollywood, he's a much more ambiguous figure than Spitting Image led us to believe.
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Interviewer
Are there other ways in which this slight tension between his, I suppose, hard man posturing and his more pragmatic approach to politics manifested itself during his two terms?
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Phil Tinline
Yes, I think there are. I think one of the things that he does brilliantly is woo the Christian right, which hadn't particularly been a phenomenon, at least for a while. I mean, in the 1950s there are very activist anti communist figures like Billy James Hargis and so on. But. And you know, you have Billy Graham and so on. But, but there is this change in the late 1970s, the thing called the Moral Majority movement, which Jerry Falwell sets running. I mean, Falwell at one point had been unbothered about abortion. He thought that was a Catholic issue, thinking in sort of doctrinal terms. But it becomes a kind of, a great kind of core celebrity. And so you have this, this, this conservative Christian sort of stripe of America that had previously basically abjured politics, and it decides to go in. And so its organizational capacity Its fundraising capacity, its vote delivering capacity is enormous. And Reagan engages with them and they think he's their guy. And you have this great irony that, you know, in the 1980 election, faced with the choice of two candidates, do the Christian right pick the piously devoutly Christian Jimmy Carter, who has remained married to one person, or do they pick the divorced Hollywood actor who picked Reagan? Right, because actually it's about politics first and foremost, but also because they think that Reagan is going to deliver their agenda. But he kind of doesn't do that much for them really. You know, he appoints Sandra Day o' Connor to the Supreme Court, who is not the candidate that they would favor. And you know, Falwell gives, I think, the closing address or certainly an important address at the Republican National Convention Convention in Dallas in 1984. But it's not obvious how much they're getting. I mean, they're obviously pushing on abortion, but that doesn't happen until the reversal of Roe versus Wade. Much, much, much more recently.
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Interviewer
I want to talk about the 1984 re election campaign and specifically the advert Morning Again in America. Can you tell us a little bit about this and why its imagery, I suppose, is so important to tell us about the period?
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Phil Tinline
Yeah, this advert, I think, which was initially on the drawing board, called Prouder, Stronger, Better, but has the opening line, It's Morning Again in America is a work of out and out political genius in my view. And I don't think that's a very original opinion because it combines a number of qualities which just, I think almost perfectly encapsulate Reagan's offer. Reagan is only mentioned at the very end. It's not all about him, all about his face, all about his name, all about what he's got to say and his boasts and so on. I mean, he was a relatively humble guy. He had a sense that he was doing this in quite a collective way. You know, he's an actor. Actors know that you get things done in, in large collaborative groups. And he took that sense right the way through to the White House. So it has that kind of, of gentleness to it. It also invokes a world that Reagan came from, but speaks to that thing we were talking about before that there used to be a kind of golden America where everything was okay. It has a real, it doesn't quite play it up overtly, but it's there, a sort of small town feel. The paper boy cycling along the pavement and throwing the papers as a business smiling businessman gets into his car. Now that probably was Filmed in an enormous sprawling suburb, but it has the aspect of Dixon, Illinois, almost where Reagan grew up and the wedding, the family carrying a carpet into their new home. There's literally a picket fence that they carry it past. It knows what it's doing. This was voiced by and written by a very practised ad man who did other campaigns for Reagan as well, that did an advert in that campaign about how there's a bear in the forest, or maybe there is, but you want to trust the strongman. Just. It's a slightly more confusing advert about the Soviet threat, but this one just brought it all into one sort of 30 seconds or so of real clarity. And it's not true that everybody in the advert is white. It's not far off, but there is a. There's a couple of children happily saluting the flag at the end, and I think certainly one of them is. Is not white. So this is there. But no, this sense of sunshine, the sense of mourning, the sense of goldenness really is what that advert is about. And there are many political situations where doing that would produce nothing but mockery. So it was not risk free to do something like that. But I do think that it was done so well and it picked its moment so well that it just caught not a mood among everyone, but a mood that was significant.
- [27:46]
Interviewer
And from the decaying streets of those seventies Hollywood films you talked about earlier to these sunlit picket fences of this ad, does this reflect a genuine shift in how America was able to see itself or how it did come to see itself in the second term of Reagan's presidency?
- [28:04]
Phil Tinline
I mean, yeah, as I say, I think for some people, life economically got better. Inflation is not much fun for anybody, but there was a broad swathe of people whose lives were economically better. And so, of course, you know, you'll be relatively more responsive to that sort of imagery. But there's also a sense, I think, that if this isn't too cynical to say that in the 70s you were kind of mandated to worry about a broader swathe of people, people than by the culture, by journalism, by sort of social norms to some extent, and that there's some sense in the 80s, don't worry, not everybody in this country is your problem. You can't be expected to. And there's some reasonableness to this, right. You can't be expected to worry about urban blight all day long. You've got a business to run, you've got children to raise. And there's something of that about it, I think, which is the kind of argument, again, that is more tenable to make when there is sufficient economic sort of okayness, sufficient stability, sufficient hope that people kind of feel that direction anyway. But also, I think, frankly, I think living in America from 1968 to 1981, if you were paying attention and you were engaged with what was going on, would have been absolutely exhausting. Even if you weren't affected by it personally, just watching the news for that period would be exhausting. And I think that there do come points in political culture where people just need a kind of sit down.
- [29:27]
Interviewer
And I think you've written really interestingly that the films, I think of the summer of 1984 and perhaps further into the 80s, show America as being sort of this endless playground. Is there a retreat in the Hollywood and in the culture of the time to this state of childhood? So stepping back from these problems and.
- [29:45]
Phil Tinline
These challenges, I mean, I think that's fair to say. I mean, I did watch this one particular film which is made in 1984, which is absolutely engaging with really tough, emotionally distressing problems of farmers and the kind of debt and pressure that farmers are under. And the wave of suicides that happened in Farmland in the 1980s is this vast crisis which is ignored by many people, which alludes to what I was saying before. But that film is a small budget film. It's a passion project of its stars. And it's unusual. No, I think you can definitely see. I mean, I remember this again from the time. I remember being kind of slightly puzzled by it. And I was. I was born in 1973, so I was only 11, 12, 13 at this point. Films like the Goonies, you know, Back to the Future, to some extent, massively, like Ghostbusters, do have this sense of you can make as much mess as you want and someone else will clear it up, but, you know, nothing really can go wrong. There's a kind of. Again, there's a sort of liberation of sort of feeling. And, you know, Steven Spielberg is a filmmaking genius, but there is something endlessly people have said about Spielberg's films, which is perhaps not childlike exactly, but kind of. There is something pretty adolescent about those sorts of films. You know, Indiana Jones, that kind of thing. But again, if you look closely, you do see a little bit of something else. I mean, I think one thing I find really interesting is the films that kind of have a little bit of that 70s kind of grit and stress and then also kind of make their way into the sun and uplands. And I think the film that captures this Perfectly and really hit me between the eyes when I watched it for the first time relatively recently is Beverly Hills Cop. Because Beverly Hills Cop begins in Detroit. It begins, and I think the guy who plays Eddie Murphy's boss is an actual cop. It begins in the world of messy, crappy urban crime. And there's lots of shots of urban Detroit. And I'm pretty sure just instinctively that these are shots of actual people, that these are not all actors, just sort of people sitting on the side of the road drinking beer out of a can, kids playing with no toys and just kind of very like you saw in the 70s. And then Eddie Murphy travels from Detroit to Los Angeles. I mean, you couldn't get a better sense of the vector that America's traveling on from what had been the great pounding Motor City, the heart of Midwestern industrial production, very unionized, very male moves to Los Angeles, which is all kind of people in sort of fruity clothes and palm trees and sunshine and is a much more kind of quote unquote, 1980s vibe. So, no, you do see the. Where they'd been before in some of these movies. I mean, that film is shot in 1984 as well. But no, I mean, I do think that J. Hoberman, the film critic, is right, that the axiomatic film of the mid-80s is Ghostbusters or maybe Top or maybe Rambo. But they're all basically doing the similar thing.
- [32:33]
Interviewer
By the time that we head to the end of the decade and the end of Reagan's presidency, is it fair to say that beneath this vector of progress for at least some people, that problems have been mounting, they have been gathering, and that there is a legacy that lies in wait for who comes next to the presidency.
- [32:50]
Phil Tinline
Yes, there is the deficit, there is the huge amount of money spent spent, a colossal amount of money spent on weaponry, which is especially striking because Reagan did not fight any major war and as I say, was in some ways very focused on. On peace, but he spends the money. So there's that legacy. There's also the Iran Contra scandal, which he just about manages to get away with by crudely. The fact that he appears to be pretty much in the early stages of Alzheimer's. And you know, the sense that his. His administration had been up to something pretty poorly thought through and very dubious indeed that they would be selling weaponry to a regime that had held its own citizens hostage, Iran, in order to raise money for a brutal anti communist insurgency that they weren't meant to be supporting, that this is going around Congress, that this is lying to The American people. This is pretty grim stuff, the Iran Contra scandal. So that damages him quite badly, I think, in the last couple of years of his presidency. But then there is also, as I say, the sense of inequality, the sense that certain people have been left out. The phrase left behind is, is overused. Right. But there is a sense that there are people in America who've been left out of the dream. And Reagan is, if you look again at his diaries in 1984, he is noticeably unsympathetic to the farmers who are struggling with debt. There is a sense, and it's dramatized in that film country that I mentioned that Jessica Lange was so keen to make, that they are being told that farming is a business like any other and if you can't run the business to make money, you should not be doing it. And that there is no sense that this is something that go on from generation to generation that is absolutely wired into the heart of America. America was built as the land of small farmers, a republic of small farmers. And that these people are just being crushed by agribusiness and debt and bad luck and international trade. You know, there's the real sense in the farmland that they are in crisis. And it's very striking that perhaps the politician who more than anybody else goes and speaks for them and with them is Jesse Jackson, who's doing that in the late 80s and he's noticeably active and sympathetic. There's also the far right are active amongst them and that leads to all sorts of conspiracist sort of unpleasantness as well. But no, there is a sense that people are being left aside. And I think, I think it would be fair to say, I'm not a scholar of this, but I think it would be fair to say that there's a pretty strong feeling in America's black communities as well that to some extent that applies to them.
- [35:13]
Interviewer
Finally, we opened by drawing parallels between two very slightly different versions of the same phrase, make America great again, which has been much repeated in recent years. Without going too much into recent politics to present day situations, what do you think are the meaningful lessons we can learn by drawing parallels between Reagan's presidency and that of President Trump?
- [35:34]
Phil Tinline
Well, I think that works in a lot of different ways, I think, and this may be something that is almost unavoidable, doing the very strange job indeed of President of the United States of America. But there is something self deluding about Reagan. Reagan believed things that weren't true. He told stories that he misremembered from movies. He had A sense that if I want it to be true, it kind of is. It was very much the American dream, but at the point of sort of self delusion. I don't think that's unique to Republican presidents. I think there was something of that certainly going on around President Biden and whether he was really fit to run again. I think you can see something of that with Lyndon Johnson getting paranoid in during the Vietnam War and so on. But I do think that there is something of that with the Trump administration as well, given Trump's, let us say, complex relationship with the truth, which was there in his first term and is thoroughly picked over and documented. So that's part of it. But I also think that perhaps on the upside, I think there is something about, again, the oddity of that job. You are supposed to be representing the hopes and tackling the fears of something like 300 million people. I mean, it's impossible, right? But you do need something pretty extraordinary. And there is something. When I spent a week in Pennsylvania traveling through the state talking to people in the week before the election, I heard this a lot. The three things that I essentially heard were prices, border strength, and there is something about that phrase I used before. Peace through strength. Strength, wanting our leader to be a strong presence in the world, not to be messed with, to represent us as we kind of either see ourselves or want to see ourselves, standing up to our enemies, closing the border, throwing out illegal immigrants, tackling cr. All these things. Whatever you think about those particular issues on either side, just as a kind of imaginative phenomenon, the idea that the President is strong is one that I think is clearly important for good or ill to a lot of Americans. I mean, there are a lot of other points of comparison, too. There's more anecdotal ones like they both survived assassination attempts and their attitude to tax cuts and so on. I mean, we could spend a whole program just doing the kind of point by point. But I do think those two are perhaps particularly salient today.
- [37:45]
Podcast Host
That was the writer and journalist Phil Tinline speaking to Matt Elton. You can hear Phil's documentary Ronald V. Donald on BBC Sounds.
- [38:05]
Phil Tinline
And Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mut Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug Limu.
- [38:21]
Home Depot Advertiser
Is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [38:23]
Phil Tinline
Cut the camera. They see us.
- [38:25]
Jack Daniels Advertiser
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com liberty liberty, liberty savings vary underwritten by liberty mutual insurance company affiliates excludes Massachusetts. You know the words dominating today's headlines.
- [38:36]
Phil Tinline
Private equity, Generative capital gains, America's chip.
- [38:39]
Nordstrom Rack Advertiser
Fueled by market volatility.
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Jack Daniels Advertiser
But do you understand how they impact your world and your wallet in a world that skims?
- [38:47]
Phil Tinline
The what?
- [38:48]
Jack Daniels Advertiser
Understand the why? Because context changes everything. Subscribe@Bloomberg.com.