And here comes the “No Labels” crowd.

Over there in the Wall Street Journal comes this from former Reagan Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. The headline:

Reagan Would Never Vote for Trump

He also didn’t care much for Biden. Like me, he’d be looking for a strong third-party candidate to support.

With all due respect to Lehman — who indeed did a great job as secretary — no. As a former Reagan White House associate political director who also worked in the Reagan presidential campaigns in 1980 and 1984, I’ll go through some of Lehman’s contentions. (READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: Trump Leads at the RNC)

He begins by saying this, bold print for emphasis supplied:

The Reagan I knew would be appalled that someone as unfit as Mr. Trump had become the GOP’s standard-bearer.

It seems the former secretary has no memory of just how unfit to be president Ronald Reagan’s own Republican peers thought Reagan to be. As I noted long ago:

Much of this is recorded, it is ironic to note, in volume one of a massive two-volume history titled The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order 1964-1980 by historian Steven F. Hayward. Hayward’s second volume is titled: The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution 1980-1989.

In other words Hayward’s massive two-book history is about the man all those fancy media people of the day, not to mention those Establishment Republicans, named above — and they were far from alone — insisted could never, ever win the presidency. A Reagan presidency was a “fantasy” of a “simple-minded” too “extreme” man who was a “minority of a minority.” If Reagan were ever nominated it would “signal the beginning of the end” of the Republican Party not to mention he was “ill-equipped for the real world beyond the footlights” and was not a “serious man.”

Among the Lehman-style GOP Establishment Reagan Republican critics were these:

• Vice President Nelson Rockefeller dismissed Reagan as “a minority of a minority” who “has been taking some extreme positions.”
• New York’s Republican Senator Jacob Javits said that Reagan’s positions are “so extreme that they would alter our country’s very economic and social structure and our place in the world to such a degree as to make our country’s place at home and abroad, as we know it, a thing of the past.”
•  Illinois Republican Senator Charles Percy said Reagan’s candidacy was “foolhardy” and would lead to a “crushing defeat” for the Republican Party. “It could signal the beginning of the end of our party as an effective force in American political life.”
•  Former President Gerald Ford said, “I hear more and more often that we don’t want, can’t afford to have a replay of 1964.” If the Republican Party nominates Ronald Reagan “it would be an impossible situation” because Reagan “is perceived as a most conservative Republican. A very conservative Republican can’t win in a national election.” Asked if that meant Ford thought Reagan can’t win, Ford replied to the New York Times: “That’s right.” The Times story went on to observe that Ford thought “Mr. Reagan would be a sure-loser in November” and that Reagan held “extreme and too-simple views.”
• In other words, these Reagan critics were the John Lehmans of the day. And just as Lehman is today insisting Trump is not fit to be president, so too did all of the above — and plenty more on the Republican side, not to mention in the media — believe the same of Reagan.

Speaking of Reagan’s media critics as his star was on the rise, recall:

• New York Times: Reagan’s candidacy is “patently ridiculous.”
• New York Times: “The astonishing thing is that this amusing but frivolous Reagan fantasy is taken so seriously by the news media and particularly by the President (Gerald Ford). It makes a lot of news, but it makes no sense.”
• New Republic: “Ronald Reagan to me is still the posturing, essentially mindless and totally unconvincing candy man that he’s been in my opinion ever since I watched his first try for the Republican nomination evaporate in Miami in 1968.”
• New Republic: “Reagan is Goldwater revisited…He is a divisive factor in the party.”
• Harper’s magazine: “That he should be regarded as a serious candidate for President is a shame and an embarrassment for the country at large to swallow.”
• Chicago Daily News: “The trouble with Reagan, of course, is that his positions on the major issues are cunningly phrased nonsense — irrationality conceived and hair-raising in their potential mischief… Here comes Barry Goldwater again, only more so, and at this stage another such debacle could sink the GOP so deep it might never recover.”
• Time: “Republicans now must decide whether he represents a conservative wave of the future or is just another Barry Goldwater calling on the party to mount a hopeless crusade against the twentieth century.”
• Newsweek: Ronald Reagan is “a man whose mind and nerve and mediagenic style have never been tested in Presidential politics and may not be adequate to the trial.”
• National Review (a conservative magazine!): “Reagan’s image remains inchoate.… At the outset of his campaign, his image is largely that of the role-playing actor — pleasant on stage, but ill-equipped for the real world beyond the footlights. Reagan does not yet project the presidential image. He is not seen as a serious man.”
• Manchester Union-Leader (a conservative New Hampshire paper!): Reagan “lacks the charisma and conviction needed to win.”
• Pravda (the official newspaper of the Soviet Union): Reagan is a “dinosaur from the ‘cold war.’… It is strange that there are still fish in the sea that are tempered by this putrid bait.”

Apparently unaware of this Reagan–Trump similarity, Lehman goes on to say:

The most fundamental difference between Reagan and Mr. Trump is that Reagan knew America’s friends from its enemies…. He would find Mr. Trump’s naked admiration of our enemies incomprehensible and dangerous.

Say what? 

To say the least, Donald Trump understands exactly who America’s enemies are, and, just as Reagan did, Trump approaches them with hard reality.

Trump, for example — contrary to the impression Lehman tries to leave — has been warning about China for years. To quote him directly:

China is bilking us for hundreds of billions of dollars by manipulating and devaluing its currency. Despite all the happy talk in Washington, the Chinese leaders are not our friends. I’ve been criticized for calling them our enemy. But what else do you call the people who are destroying your children’s and grandchildren’s future? What name would you prefer me to use for the people who are hell bent on bankrupting our nation, stealing our jobs, who spy on us to steal our technology, who are undermining our currency, and ruining our way of life? To my mind, that’s an enemy.

That would hardly be “naked admiration” of an American enemy.

In other words, just as Reagan had no hesitation in calling out the Soviet Union as “an Evil Empire,” Trump has had no hesitancy in calling China “an enemy.”

Lehman also says:

Further, Reagan wouldn’t be able to fathom a president going out of his way to insult the leaders of North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies by suggesting that Russia could have its way with them if they didn’t spend more on defense.

Does it really need to be explained that Trump — far from being the first American president to be exasperated by the repeated behavior of NATO allies in not paying their bills — is making the obvious point to allies that they need to carry their fair share of the burden to keep Russia at bay? In Trump’s exact words:

You’ve got to pay. You got to pay your bills.

Is Lehman not aware that President Dwight Eisenhower, as cited in detail in historian Stephen Ambrose’s seriously detailed two-volume biography Eisenhower: The President, had this to say of our NATO allies?:

“I get weary of the European habit of taking our money,” the president wrote, “resenting any slight hint as to what they should do, and then assuming, in addition, full right to criticize us as bitterly as they may desire. In fact, it sometimes appears that their indulgence in this kind of criticism varies in direct ratio to the amount of help we give them.” In fact, the whole thing made him mad as hell, and “makes me wonder whether the Europeans are as grown up and mature as they try to make it appear.”

Or in other words, Ike as Trump.

Amazingly, Lehman writes, bold for emphasis:

Reagan’s optimism wasn’t merely stylistic. It was substantive. He recognized that a nation that had lost its confidence during the Carter administration needed to be reminded of its greatness. Mr. Trump, it seems, has no understanding of the importance of speaking to the better angels of our nature.

Hello? And what, exactly, does “MAGA” stand for? Apparently it’s news to Lehman that it stands for “Make America Great Again.” A slogan that was also used by … Ronald Reagan. As seen here.

One could go on.

In the Reagan era, Secretary of the Navy John Lehman was seriously a star.

But, alas, it seems now that Lehman has simply retreated behind the Establishment barricades, unknowingly repeating charges once made of Reagan and applying them to Trump.

And this is going to be the propaganda forthcoming from the No Labels crowd with which Lehman is now associating himself.

The irony is that Lehman’s charges against Trump — and presumably those of his Establishment pals in the No Labels crowd — are just as off track today as were those once made by the GOP Establishment against Reagan.