How does Donald (Trump) compare to Ronald (Reagan)?

Trump is a Different Man for Different Times

I arrived in sunny Southern California in 1963 eager continue my studies in physics after suffering two years of university in the frigid climes of upstate New York. I cannot tell you who was governor of New York during that time except to say that Nelson Rockefeller comes to mind and he had a wife named Happy.   Students then, at least the ones I knew, didn’t pay much attention to politics. When asked by a USC admissions director what I thought about the assassination of John F. Kennedy that occurred on the day of my interview, I carelessly replied that I didn’t think it made a lot of difference. Luckily for me he was an Orange County Republican and he decided that I belonged at USC.

In those days, USC was a safe place for complacent Republican sympathizers.  Occasionally a professor would ask uncomfortable questions about why Ronald Reagan was qualified to be governor. The safe answer was, and it turned out to be truer than anyone imagined, that Reagan knew how to choose smart people to actually run the government. Reagan is now widely acclaimed as the great communicator. He apparently was good at negotiating with dangerous world leaders as his legacy attests. But most of all, he surrounded himself as governor of California, and later as President, with very smart people, good people, moral people, and he left the country in the safe hands of his Supreme Court appointments.

The reason for the above background is to demonstrate that I was a witness to the Reagan Revolution so it is part of me. I watched Ronald Reagan in public life for 16 years. In spite of Reagan’s desire to cut the size of the federal government, split government substantially limited his agenda. He excelled in foreign affairs but his domestic agenda was stuck in the Great Society.

Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan. I miss the affable Reagan smile and easy retort.

So how does Ronald compare to Donald?  So far it is too early to judge although everyone is anxious to do so.

The thing that immediately comes to mind is the Internet.

Reagan had television, a limited universe of talking heads, newspapers whose political biases were tame but well known, and a bunch of news magazines that were still able to turn a profit. The volume of information was manageable.  Narcissism was a word used by psychologists. People took pictures of OTHER people and sent the film off to be developed.

With the Internet, the volume of information has reached astronomical heights and its dissemination is cheap. One can conclude from the laws of supply and demand that political opinion has depreciated to the point of being virtually worthless. News outlets publish trash on page one, and later rescind it on page 6 with no apology.   On the ropes now is Time Magazine!

Is President Trump is a narcissist as the selfie crowd and a bunch of disgrundled psychiatrists are fond of proclaiming? A good argument can be made that a lot of psychiatry and clinical psychology is not based on solid science. Medicine is based on chemistry,  biology, and physics. Medical research, experimental, clinical, and epidemiological, rely on hard data that are evaluated mathmatically for statistical significance. The so-called soft sciences, anthropology, economics, epidemiology, geography, policy, psychology, and sociology may use scientific methods of inquiry but their discipline identifies better with scholars in the humanities. Narcisism only exists as a medical diagnosis because of the profoundly chaotic state of medical practice in the western world. DMS-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) is an example of the medical/government complex inventing diseases to treat. Narcissism is one such invented disease and would be better characterized as Greek mythology.

Political acrimony is either at an all time high or we just know about it because of the Internet and its handmaiden, cable news. A 24-hour news cycle repeats the same lame stories as if by repetition they will achieve credibility.

So far Donald Trump appears to be choosing good people, at least one great new Supreme Court justice, and he is slowly filling the ranks of circuit judges. Hopefully he will get it right.  Some of his excellent cabinet people are quietly laying the groundwork for the revolution Reagan was unable to complete.

In the meantime my European friends are turning their sophisticated noses up at our gaff and twitter prone President who is breaking all the rules of political correctness.

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Melania, we’re out of toilet paper. Bring me some more international agreements.

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The above cartoon appeared in the March 6, 2017 online issue of OBV Online and is used here as an illustration of German sentiments. The caption on the OBV Website reads, “International agreements are taken very seriously in the White House. Cartoon: Bengen”