Everyone is exhausted with Donald Trump, and his legal problems, and his scandals, and his indictments, and his multiple impeachments, etc. If only we could get someone else without Trump’s baggage, the media could move on, and we’d finally put Democrats on the defensive about Biden’s record.
While I am certainly disappointed that DeSantis won’t be our nominee, I have no illusions about how he would be treated. The Democrats and the media have seen it as their mission to unseat every Republican President since they took down Nixon. Every single Republican nominee in my lifetime has been “literally Hitler,” including Bob Dole who actually fought against Hitler. Every Republican President in my life has had multiple scandals that were “bigger than Watergate.” And now that impeachments and indictments are on the table, it is an absolute certainty that every GOP presidential candidate going forward will face multiple nuisance indictments, and every Republican President will be impeached if there is a Democrat-controlled House.
Amidst all this, the NeverTrump faux-conservatives are in a constant state of reverence about Ronald Reagan, and how shocked and disgusted St. Ronnie would be about Trump’s Republican Party. Don’t misunderstand, Reagan was the best president of my life until Trump’s first three years. I admire Reagan, and I wish he could have governed by executive order like his successors started doing. But I also remember as a high schooler interested in politics that the 1980 equivalent of NeverTrumpers were appalled by Reagan, which led to John Anderson running as 1980’s version of Evan McMullin. Country Club Republicans were as repulsed by Reagan’s blue collar coalition as NeverTrumpers are with MAGA.
With polite Republicans of today lamenting that we’re stuck with Trump rather than having a dignified, non-controversial candidate like Ronald Reagan, I would like to re-publish a piece I wrote back in 2019.
A recent meme among allegedly conservative pundits is that they are exhausted from covering the Trump presidency. With a heavy heart, they state that the exhausting nature of Trump’s presidency is not sustainable, and therefore something must change. Ace’s readers know that these are the same police-the-right quislings who crave guest appearances on cable news shows, and who spend all day on Twitter flirting with the left-wing journalists at ABCNNBCBS. All the same, the issue of “Trump exhaustion among the right” has received lots of media play. So let’s try to recall if there was ever another Republican President whose tenure was “exhausting”.
The first president I ever voted for was Ronald Reagan. By the end of his presidency I was exhausted. Although I never stopped supporting him, I was worn out from the endless “scandals” the media breathlessly reported on every day. It wasn’t just Iran-Contra. The media reported incessantly on the “homeless crisis” that was a direct result of Reagan’s cruel domestic policies. Not only did Reagan not care about the homeless, but homelessness somehow made the rich even richer. The media told me this. And I was exhausted.
Remember Bitburg? By offering remembrance to fallen German WWII conscripts, Reagan set off a media firestorm, without which the media would have politely returned to reporting on Reagan’s foreign policy goals. And what was Reagan’s chief foreign policy goal? Via the arms race he sought to blow the world up in a nuclear war. The media told me this. And I was exhausted.
Remember when Nancy Reagan replaced the existing White House china with expensive new china paid for entirely by private contributions, at no cost to the taxpayers? I don’t recall why, but this was an outrage. There was a media firestorm. Everyone was outraged. All the polite conservatives told me that this kind of outrageous behavior is what kept the media from reporting on Democrat scandals and misbehavior instead. And I was exhausted.
And it never stopped, whether it was “ketchup is a vegetable” or “trees cause pollution”, the outrages never stopped. The media repeatedly told me that Reagan was just like Nixon and Hitler, only much worse. They were exhausted. Everyone was exhausted. I was so exhausted that I happily cast my vote in 1988 for George HW Bush, ready for the media to calm down, and knowing that I’d no longer be exhausted in the era of GHW Bush’s kinder and gentler conservatism.
Guess what. Both Bush presidencies were exhausting. The media’s outrage machinery never stops when a Republican is in the White House. In the fashion they attacked Reagan and both Bushes, the media also attacks Trump, but they have never before encountered a Republican President who fights back and treats them with the contempt they deserve.
And to those “conservative” pundits who are exhausted. Quit your job. Learn to code. Do something else that isn’t as exhausting as reading Tweets from your Beltway idols. Real Americans sweating in real jobs don’t need you whimpering that it’s time for us to surrender in this war that we are winning
It hardly needs to be said, but if Ronald Reagan were running for President today, he’d be facing multiple indictments and blue states would be kicking him off the ballot. And all the polite Republicans that are exhausted with Trump would be apoplectic that a divisive, flawed man like Ronald Reagan was leading the Republican Party.
[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]