Why a Reagan Ad Provoked Trump

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Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan briefly crossed paths last week. The Canadian province of Ontario arranged the encounter. As the Toronto Blue Jays opened the World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Friday night, an anti-tariff advertisement from the provincial government ran during the game, featuring clips from a 1987 Reagan radio address. The ad reordered Reagan’s words but did not necessarily change their drift: Reagan, a late-20th-century Republican, favored free trade. Trump, the self-described “Tariff Man,” did not appreciate the reminder. He suggested that the spot had been generated by AI and later called it a “fraud” when announcing an additional 10 percent in duties on Canadian goods.

At first glance, Trump and Reagan belong to the same lineage. Both are talismanic figures in the Republican Party and national politics who achieved their stature by translating the skills honed in one media world into the next. Reagan, a studio-film actor and spokesman, seamlessly adapted to the presidency by turning it into a series of televised scenes. Trump, the tabloid caricature and reality-TV star, has taken an almost unbreakable hold of Americans’ attention by transforming the presidency into an endless scroll of outrage and provocation.

And yet, the media environments in which both thrived could not be more different. They reward radically different tones, rhythms, and understandings of what political authority looks like. The conflict over the Ontario advertisement, then, is not simply about how the Republican Party has shifted on trade. It lays bare how our media environment has remade the performance of the presidency itself.

Late in his second term, Reagan said something on ABC that he’d often said in private: “There have been times in this office when I’ve wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.” Indeed, Reagan’s background on the screen informed his administration’s entire approach to public relations in an era when, as one aide put it, “people get their news and form their judgments based largely on what they see on television.” Where John F. Kennedy, the first telegenic president, had a sparse PR team, Reagan reportedly had a team of almost 40. Ahead of public appearances, he and his aides scripted his lines and blocked his moves in the language of movie scenes. Many press conferences involved two days of preparation, including careful planning for how Reagan would enter the room and rehearsals for every possible question he might face.

Reagan himself was known to blend stories from TV and movies with actual events. Reflecting in 1988 on a summit with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, he told the press that the experience had felt something like one of Cecil B. DeMille’s “great historical spectacles.” Meeting Gorbachev three years earlier, in 1985, he had wondered if humans would forget their differences and unite in the event of an alien invasion—a scenario that Colin Powell, then an aide to Reagan’s defense secretary, suspected had come from the 1951 science-fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The sensibilities of that older media milieu—wholesome, affirming, a little bit soft-focus—informed an approach to the presidency that prioritized a shared national narrative. In the broadcast monoculture of the late 20th century, before politically segmented cable news, tens of millions of Americans watched the same evening newscasts and prime-time shows. To Reagan’s opponents, his sunny projections of national consensus were maddening because they worked so well. His presentation of a harmonious whole smoothed out the very real dislocations of American life in the 1980s, pushing deindustrialization, homelessness, racial inequality, and the AIDS crisis out of the frame. This mythical vision of America—the comfortable home of the Gipper speech—could gloss over the hard edges of his administration’s domestic policies.

Perhaps this is why the Canadian ad provoked Trump so much. Where Reagan blurred conflict in order to project unity, Trump heightens it. The hard edges are the point. The Ontario advertisement was about trade, but it may also touch on something deeper. Reagan’s words—calm, confident, and delivered with his preternatural ease in public performance—risk being convincing. The radio address itself was a minor weekend chore at Camp David, prompted by rumblings of protectionism by congressional Democrats. But in the video recording, Reagan reads the script fluidly, a pro’s pro in that medium as well.

To Trump, and to the media environment in which he thrives, Reagan’s composed performance, with its affirmation of consensus, is almost intolerable. It must be discredited not because it is inaccurate but because it represents an entirely different model of what presidential authority looks like—online and in the reality-TV drama of Trump’s Cabinet meetings and Oval Office confrontations. His social-media presidency—now shading into the age of AI slop—rewards a different set of political instincts entirely. Earlier this month, the president posted a video of himself dropping slop of the excrement variety on American citizens on the day of the recent “No Kings” protests. Such communication makes sense in a world in which policy wins come not by staging consensus but by stoking division. Never mind that the MAGA slogan promises a return to the kind of America that Reagan represents. The rewards of targeting domestic enemies, ridiculing opponents, and shaming others are simply too great.

In January 1986, after the Challenger explosion claimed the lives of seven crew members, Reagan sat at the Resolute Desk for a brief televised address to the nation. It is a small masterpiece of presidential communication. Watching now, it feels like a transmission from another planet. In just under five minutes, Reagan expresses shock and grief, and empathy for the families of the crew. He speaks directly to the millions of schoolchildren who watched the tragedy unfold, assuring them that the astronauts died in pursuit of something larger than themselves. He closes with a flourish borrowed from a 1941 poem. They “slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God,” he says, before the camera fades to black. Tip O’Neill, then the Democratic speaker of the House, admitted that the speech made him weep. Reagan, he said, was the best public speaker he had ever seen.

The laws of gravity that created such experiences of unity and collective grief no longer apply. In a world dominated by endless scrolling and ever more slop, all of the forces are pulling us outward, away from one another. We, too, are slipping the surly bonds of Earth.

Related:

• Anne Applebaum: Why Trump turned to the sewer
• Franklin Foer: Donald Trump’s war on reality

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By Amy Weiss-Meyer

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PS

Thank you for reading. For more stories about the treasures, surprises, and oddities in The Atlantic’s archives, please subscribe to our Time-Travel Thursdays newsletter. You can find more of my work there, including articles about a frightening American fable, the birth of the attention economy, and why college rankings were once a shocking experiment.

— Jake

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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