If life were directed by Steven Spielberg — as, of course, it should be — something striking would happen if any supporter of Donald Trump entered the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
It would probably be something like what happened at the climax of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” When the Nazis committed the stark blasphemy of daring to open the most holy Jewish relic, the Ark of the Covenant. Heads explode. Faces melt. Lightning strikes everyone.
The only survivors were the ones who didn’t look.
Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah and late-blooming Donald Trump supporter, walked in to the Reagan Library a couple of weeks ago and emerged unscathed.
As, of course, he should have.
Cox was there for a conversation with New Mexico Gov. Michell Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, where they offered useful advice on how to detox our political culture.
This is where Cox said he still hoped Trump could be the kind of leader who would, in the words of his Cox’s own campaign, “disagree better.” Continuing the use of movie metaphors to understand our politics, I guess Cox is able to see Doctor Strange-like infinite alternative universes.
What is really happening with Cox, though, is what happened after the devastation of World War I. When a lot of smart people became so devoted to a world without arms that they stood by while the Nazis built their war machine, and the world suffered greatly for it.
(A video of the discussion is available on the Reagan Foundation’s website. If you are among the vanishingly small percentage of the population that can watch an hour-long video — with no explosions, melting heads or lightning strikes — I commend it to your attention.)
Cox may have been protected by what seems to be his genuine life-long admiration for the nation’s 40th president.
On his own Facebook page, Cox posted some photos of himself and his wife, Abby, in front of Reagan portraits and statues and wrote about how he “tried to emulate Ronald Reagan’s positive and aspirational conservatism.”
Cox threw all that under the bus when, during last year’s campaign, he announced his support for Trump’s return to the White House.
If Cox, or any other current Republican office-holder, really admired Reagan and grasped what Reagan stood for, then he would know that Trump’s attitude toward the nation, the presidency and America’s place in the world would make Reagan sick.
Reagan was not my favorite president. His belief in the discredited-from-birth theory of trickle-down economics set the nation’s course to huge deficits and increasing economic and social inequality.
Like every Republican president since Richard Nixon, Reagan got elected playing on white resentment and tooting some dog-whistle racist stereotypes about the undeserving poor driving their Cadillacs to the welfare office.
(For more on this, I recommend a remarkably well-written and even-handed “Reagan: His Life and Legend,” from conservative scholar Max Boot.)
But, as the conservative pundit and humorist P.J. O’Rourke said when he turned his back on Trump and announced that he was supporting Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, it could be said of Reagan that he was wrong about absolutely everything, but wrong within normal parameters.
Reagan had rich Republican California friends who propped him up financially and helped him score some sweet real estate deals. But it is impossible to imagine Reagan selling pardons, soliciting gifts from autocracies in the Middle East, cozying up to the Kremlin or assuming to himself the power to arrest and deport political opponents and to slash huge portions of the federal bureaucracy — for which he had no love — in an flurry of unconstitutional executive orders.
Reagan could be humble. Trump would dissolve if it wasn’t for his arrogance.
Trump loves “big, beautiful walls.” Reagan hated them.
He said so most famously in Berlin. Less remembered, perhaps because it was expressed less belligerently, was what Reagan said in 1989 in his farewell address as president. He made a final attempt to explain his vision of America as a “shining city on a hill.”
“In my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace,” Reagan said. “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.”
As a good Reaganite, Spencer Cox probably sees that, too.
Or he did, before Donald Trump came along.
George Pyle, reading The New York Times at The Rose Establishment.
George Pyle, opinion editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, recently had the privilege of walking through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, unencumbered by the wall that Ronald Reagan denounced.
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