Numerous Democrats have quoted Ronald Reagan, trying to show how far the Republican Party has fallen under Trump, yet there is much in Reagan’s approach that Trump has taken and elaborated on: specifically, the tough guy presidential persona. It is easy to look at Ronald Reagan and ask what has happened to the Republican Party, but there is a clear line of descent, and it started in 1980, during Reagan’s first election, when the Republicans attempted to rewrite the desirable traits of a president to focus less on policy and more on masculine presentation.
If Ronald Reagan tried to inhabit the boorish yet endearing version of the cowboy in order to win votes, Donald Trump embraced The Searchers’ Ethan Edwards, an angry racist, lashing out at everyone around him. The road from Reagan’s persona to Trump’s is not a long one, and the space in between was paved by George W. Bush. Reagan played a cowboy in film, but Bush tried to be a real-life cowboy, right down to the way he dressed. He wore the hat, he had the accent, he hunted, and he had the plain, tough guy talk of an American western figure. Terrorists want to attack American soldiers in Iraq? “Bring it on.”