Although Boot once felt “incredulous that anyone could possibly compare Reagan to Trump,” he now sees “startling similarities.” Reagan’s easygoing manner, Boot acknowledges, concealed hard-to-stomach beliefs. Reagan viewed the New Deal, which he’d once supported, as “fascism.” He raised preposterous fears about the Soviet capture of Hollywood, and fed his fellow-actors’ names to the F.B.I. When Republican legislators largely voted for the landmark civil-rights laws of the nineteen-sixties, Reagan stood against them. (He’s on tape calling Black people “monkeys.”) He also campaigned against Medicare, insisting that it would lead the government to “invade every area of freedom as we have known in this country.” For unconscionably long into his Presidency, he refused to address a pandemic, AIDS, that was killing tens of thousands of his constituents, and he privately speculated that it might be God’s punishment for homosexuality. Then there is his campaign motto, ominous in hindsight: “Let’s make America great again.”
Recent events have forced Boot to ask if Reagan was part of the rot that has eaten away at Republicanism. Boot now sees him as complicit in the “hard-right turn” the Party took after Dwight D. Eisenhower which “helped set the G.O.P.—and the country—on the path” to Trump.
And yet Boot sees a redeeming quality as well: Reagan could relax his ideology. He was an anti-tax crusader who oversaw large tax hikes, an opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment who appointed the first female Supreme Court Justice, and a diehard anti-Communist who made peace with Moscow. “I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” Reagan famously quipped. But he delivered that line while announcing “record amounts” of federal aid. He viewed the world in black-and-white, yet he governed in gray.
Reagan tolerated a gap between rhetoric and reality because, for him, rhetoric was what mattered. “The greatest leaders in history are remembered more for what they said than for what they did,” he insisted. (The example he offered was Abraham Lincoln, apparently rating the Gettysburg Address a more memorable achievement than the defeat of the Confederacy.) When it came to policy, Reagan was happy to hand things off to “the fellas”—his generic term for his aides, whose names he could not reliably recall.