Trump and Reagan: Two Hostage Crises, Two Inaugurations

In a striking statement during a wild press conference, President-elect Donald Trump has vowed that if the hostages still being held in Gaza by Hamas are not released by the time of his Jan. 20 inauguration, “all hell will break out in the Middle East.” In remarks at Mar-a-Lago, Trump threatened: “It will not be good for Hamas and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone. All hell will break out. I don’t have to say anymore, but that’s what it is.”

It was an extraordinary statement. It also harkens back to what happened in January 1981, specifically on Jan. 20, 1981, at the time of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration.

For 444 days, 52 American hostages had been held captive by Islamist fanatics in Tehran. They had been seized at the U.S. embassy on Nov. 4, 1979, in protest of President Jimmy Carter allowing the Shah of Iran admission into the United States for medical treatment for cancer. Carter had outrageously abandoned the Shah, who had long been America’s top ally in the Middle East. President Richard Nixon had said, “Whatever the Shah wants, the Shah gets.” As Henry Kissinger put it, America’s partnership with Iran was the “starting point” of its foreign policy in the region. Our two “pillars of strength” were Iran and Israel.

Until Jimmy Carter came along. Carter lost Iran. The Shah was replaced with the Ayatollah. Iran immediately went from being a top ally to becoming the world’s worst terror state. A situation that remains to this day.

The seizure of those U.S. hostages was a stunning, unprecedented situation for Americans. Carter tried to get them released, even authorizing a daring but failed rescue mission on April 4, 1980, known as Desert One. It became an infamous military fiasco. No hostages were rescued; instead, U.S. soldiers were killed during the aborted operation.

For those reasons and many more, Carter was crushed by Reagan in the November 1980 election, losing 44 of 50 states and the Electoral College 489 to 49.

Ronald Reagan became president of the United States on Jan. 20, 1981. The moment that he swore the oath of office, with his right hand placed on his mother Nelle’s Bible — opened to 2 Chronicles 7:14, where Nelle had written, “A wonderful verse for the healing of a nation” — the hostages were freed. In his Inaugural Address, Reagan affirmed: “We’re not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. So, with all the creative energy at our command, let us begin an era of national renewal.”

That theme pervaded Reagan’s inaugural ceremony. There was no mistaking the message. The next day’s headline beamed across the New York Times: “Reagan Takes Oath as 40th President: Promises an ‘Era of National Renewal.’” It is no exaggeration to say that the change in mood began at that moment, as the hostages were let go in Tehran — prompting the Times to continue the Reagan headline into a second line across the top-of-the-fold: “Minutes Later, 52 U.S. Hostages in Iran Fly to Freedom After 444-Day Ordeal.”

It has long been a source of controversy and debate as to what exactly the incoming Reagan team might have done — or what Ronald Reagan himself might have said — to precipitate the release of the hostages. Carter National Security Council official Gary Sick promoted a conspiracy theory about an “October Surprise.” But it was hardly a surprise.

I’ve written about the event for years in books. I often quote a revealing Nov. 4, 1980 statement from Col. Charles W. Scott, one of those in captivity that day when Reagan defeated Carter in the presidential election. Scott recalled the reaction of his captors to Reagan’s victory: “I remember specifically when one of the guards came in and said, ‘Reagan is now the new president. What do you think will happen when he comes into office?’ I didn’t say a word, I just went ‘boom.’ And they said, ‘Really?’ And I said ‘Yeah, the first day he’s in office after the Inaugural ceremony, he’ll go back to the White House and say, ‘OK, tell the Iranians if they don’t let those hostages go by midnight tomorrow night, its war.’”

Reagan’s opponents on the Left also promoted that image — though for very different reasons. They aimed to portray him as a wild man, a nutjob, a trigger-happy cowboy looking to blow up the world starting Jan. 20, 1981. Ironically, the Left’s framing of Reagan as a warmonger surely served to scare the Iranians into more conciliatory behavior.

Over 20 years later, I interviewed Reagan adviser Richard V. Allen about this. (See Paul Kengor’s tribute: “We Win, They Lose:’ Remembering Richard V. Allen.”) Allen told me that Reagan “sought to be very careful not to inflame” or undercut the Carter administration, refraining “from doing or saying anything that would jeopardize whatever the administration was doing to secure the release of the hostages.” On the other hand, conceded Allen, “We never discouraged any journalist from thinking that, or better yet, writing or saying, in effect, ‘The Iranians had better watch out, make their deal with Carter now, because once Reagan is in office, things will be radically different.’”

No question. In fact, in March 1980, Ronald Reagan publicly stated (akin to what Donald Trump is expressing now) that the United States should issue a deadline for the hostages’ release and take “unpleasant action” against Iran if the deadline was not met. Like Donald Trump today, Reagan didn’t describe what that action might look like. He didn’t need to.

Then came Reagan’s electoral victory on Nov. 4, 1980. As with Trump’s victory on Nov. 5, 2024, Reagan escalated his rhetoric against the Islamist hostage takers. “In the weeks leading up to the Inauguration,” wrote Reagan later in his memoirs, “I had gone out of my way to say some nasty things in public about the Ayatollah Khomeini, hoping it would encourage him to expedite the negotiations before we arrived in Washington.”

In December 1980, Reagan explicitly warned: “There should be no delay in freeing the hostages.”

Clearly, the Iranians knew that Reagan meant business. They didn’t fear Jimmy Carter, but they did fear Ronald Reagan. Today, one imagines that Hamas fears Donald Trump far more than it fears Joe Biden.

Whatever prompted the Iranian release of the U.S. hostages in January 1981, there’s no debating that the release happened, and it was a joyous moment and dramatic departure from four years of the awful presidency of Jimmy Carter. The only four-year presidency that we’ve seen since that resembles Carter’s disaster has been the Biden presidency. Biden likewise ruined the Middle East region from Iran to Afghanistan, not to mention his shared economic-domestic incompetencies, particularly massive inflation and energy/gas prices. With Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter, history has repeated itself.

Will history in January 2025 likewise repeat itself for the better, with another big switch to a Republican president, again commencing on Inauguration day? Will Donald Trump see hostages released on Jan. 20, just as Ronald Reagan did? We shall see. Trump is certainly doing his part to try to make it happen.

READ MORE from Paul Kengor:

American Spectator Editor Paul Kengor on Jimmy Carter

Why It’s a Wonderful Life Is the Greatest Christmas Movie Ever

Looking Back at the Year — 1984

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