Republican debate: Ronald and Donald still loom larger than the candidates onstage

Seven candidates for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination will debate Wednesday night, but the proceedings will be dominated by two former GOP presidents:

Ronald Reagan, whose presidential library is the site of the second Republican presidential debate, and Donald Trump, who bypassed the event but is the heavy favorite to win the party’s nomination for the third consecutive election.

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Every candidate onstage in California on Wednesday night will be looking to escape from Trump’s shadow. And party leaders have been trying to ascend to Reagan’s level for decades.

It is in some ways symbolic, as the GOP looks to navigate changes in the party’s electoral coalition from the Reagan years to the Trump era.

Some candidates, led by former Vice President Mike Pence, are actively resisting that transition. Others, like fellow Trump administration alum and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, have argued for continuity.

Haley’s speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention was an extended tribute to Reagan’s U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and her speech at the 1984 convention.

“Joe Biden and the Democrats are still blaming America first,” Haley said. “Donald Trump has always put America first. He has earned four more years as president.”

Now Haley, like Pence, is running for the office Reagan and Trump held.

AP

While Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) rarely directly criticizes Trump, his campaign is premised on the idea Republicans still prefer Reagan’s sunny optimism to the 45th president’s more dour assessment of the national condition.

Scott borrowed Reagan’s “Morning in America” catchphrase in a fundraising email that went out hours before the debate. Trump is more associated with “American carnage.”

In a speech in Scott’s South Carolina earlier this week, Trump said the United States was in decline and might be finished if Biden is reelected. He said America might as well be a “developing country” and was at risk of being baited into World War III.

The differences aren’t purely stylistic. The Trump-led GOP is more skeptical of foreign military interventions, though Reagan also used force abroad sparingly during his two terms. Trump largely rejects free trade and is running on a platform of more comprehensive tariffs than his levies against China during his first term.

Reagan signed an immigration amnesty into law in 1986. Trump ran hard against such proposals in 2016, and most Republicans have abandoned them, including some boosters of the ill-fated 2013 Gang of Eight proposal.

Trump’s signature campaign message in 2016 was “Build the wall.” Reagan took a different tone.

“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it,” he said in his farewell address in 1989. “But in my mind, it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it and see it still.”

Reagan was reelected in a 49-state landslide, like Richard Nixon before him. Trump lost in 2020, but polling shows he is a viable candidate to serve nonconsecutive terms for the first time since Grover Cleveland. And many rank-and-file Republicans view Trump as a quasi-incumbent who got a raw deal in his first go-round with Biden.

The ideological battle inside the Republican Party isn’t primarily Reagan versus Trump. In fact, criticism of Reagan is a rare no-go zone for Trump, who had his own tax cuts in the tradition begun by Reagan. He continued the conservative transformation of the judiciary also started by Reagan, culminating in the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade with all three Trump appointees joining the majority.

Trump’s allies have much more explicitly run against former President George W. Bush, the late Sen. John McCain, and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT). Trump had a word for the “terrible” people who advised him in his first term when he sat down with Tucker Carlson during the first Republican National Committee debate.

“I would say Bushies,” Trump said. “I say that with respect to the Bush family, but they were Bushies, and it just doesn’t work out for us.”

Movement conservatives inside the Reagan administration had their own fights with officials in the mold of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, who was seen as a centrist pretender to the throne on the Right.

But one Trump insider dismissed Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), the runner-up in most 2024 GOP primary polls, as a “Reaganite” earlier this year. DeSantis has tried to bridge the gap between older and newer styles of conservatism. DeSantis’s relationship with Trump in some ways mirrors Reagan’s with Barry Goldwater.

Reagan, however, was a more charismatic figure than Goldwater. Trump associates say that is where any comparison with their candidate and DeSantis ends.

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Republicans have spent decades trying to compete with the image and accomplishments of a Hollywood movie star turned president.

Now they are grappling with a New York developer turned reality TV star who made the same transition to the White House.