Donald Trump quarreled with the Bush family and has regularly claimed that he is the largest Republican president since the first, Abraham Lincoln. He has largely avoided attacking another claimant of that title, Ronald Reagan. Until now.
On Sunday, after the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation asked Trump and the Republican party to stop raising funds for the 40th president’s name, the 45th fired a characteristic volley in return.
“So the Washington Post runs the Reagan Foundation,” Trump tweeted Sunday afternoon, linking Reagan to a deadly media enemy shortly after leaving his New Jersey golf club to throw red campaign hats at a group of followers.
In doing so, the president retweeted Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Policy Center, who noted that “Frederick J Ryan Jr, who chairs the Reagan foundation board, is also editor and CEO of the Washington Post.”
Sabato added: “Hmmm …”
The source of the contest was a Post column published on Saturday. He said the Reagan Foundation “has demanded that Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee (RNC) stop raising money from the campaign using the name and image of Ronald Reagan.”
The complaint was about an email sent on July 19. From “Donald J Trump” and titled “Ronald Reagan and Yours for Real”, he offered for donations of $ 45 or more a “limited edition” set of two “iconic” gold-colored coins, one showing Reagan and the another to Trump.
“The coins,” the Post reported, “were mounted with a 1987 photograph of Reagan and Trump shaking hands at a White House reception line, the kind of fleeting contact presidents have with thousands of people a year.” .
The email was sent to a list that included reporters, but it also said, “This offer is NOT available to the general public, so please DO NOT share this email with anyone.”
The RNC agreed to stop, the Post said, although it noted that the coins remained available on Saturday. The Post also noted its connection to Ryan Jr, whom it said declined to comment.
Reagan, who made Jimmy Carter a one-term president, is a modern Republican hero. Trump, looking at himself as single-term president, not so much.
Like most Republican politicians, he has tried to bond with Reagan. In July 2019, for example, Trump shared a tweet that contained a fake Reagan quote pasted over the same image used in the fundraising email.
“For my life,” said the false quote, “and I will never know how to explain it. When I met that young man, I felt that I was the only one shaking hands with the president.”
Trump’s retweet contained a word of its own: “Cute.”
Relations between the Reagans and the Trumps have not been uniformly cordial. In April 2019, the daughter of former President Patti Davis wrote a column for the Post titled “Dear Republicans: Stop Using My Father, Ronald Reagan, to Justify Your Silence on Trump.”
“At this point in the history of the United States,” he wrote, “when the democracy my father committed to and the constitution he swore to uphold … are being degraded and torn by an irreverent and mocking man who traffics in intimidation and dishonesty”. You remain silent.
“You are silent when President Trump speaks of immigrants as trash, ripping children from their parents’ arms and putting them in cages … You were silent when this president flattered Kim Jong-un and took Vladimir Putin’s word … and now you don’t act when Trump [shows] his absolute contempt “for Congress.
In his Sunday tweet, Trump also showed contempt for a member of the Republican establishment, former Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan.
“RINO Paul Ryan is on the Fox Board, which has been terrible,” the president wrote, using an acronym for “Republican in Name Only.”
“We will win anyway, even with the fake Fox News suppression polls (which have been very wrong for five years)!”
Trump also brought Fox News together with the Post as part of “Lamestream Media.”
A hundred days after the election, most general polls, including those on Fox News, put the president behind Joe Biden at the national level and in the battlefield states.
