(Dobbs) Ronald Reagan Would Weep For America

Dictatorships are "created by all the people who fall in line and say yes.”

Ronald Reagan would weep for America. That’s what his daughter says. I think she’s right. 

I covered Reagan as a candidate and, during his presidency, on some of his foreign trips. He was a decent man. He loved his country. His politics and policies weren’t to my liking, but he was a decent man. And more. When he reached agreement with the Soviets to reduce the nuclear threat, he was a practical man. When he put the first woman ever, Sandra Day O’Conner, on the Supreme Court, he was a fair man. When he demanded in a still-divided Berlin, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” he was a strong man.

Donald Trump is none of those. As we learned on January 6th, he loves himself more than he loves his nation. That’s why Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, drew a contrast between her dad and Trump in The New York Times. “His eyes often welled with tears,” she wrote of her father, “when ‘America the Beautiful’ was played, but it wasn’t just sentiment. He knew how fragile democracy is, how easily it can be destroyed.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if when Donald Trump hears that stirring song, he’s calculating a way to profit from it.

“What would my father say about the decline of civility and the ominous future of our democracy?”, Davis asked in her commentary. Her answer took us straight to Trump: “I don’t think he would address his party’s front-runner at all. I think he would focus on the people who cheer at that candidate’s rallies.” And then she hit on the enduring menace of the cult that stands with Donald Trump: “He would point out to them that dictatorships aren’t created by one person; they’re created by all the people who fall in line and say yes.”

Trump is Trump, a man awash in lies, in vengeance, in crimes, in ego. But even when he’s gone, what about “all the people who fall in line and say yes?” They will still be around.

They are the politicians Trump once totally trashed— the Mario Rubios, the Ted Cruzes, the Lindsey Grahams— who now endorse the man and shower him with praise because, some analysts believe, they’re petrified to go head-to-head with him and his cult. They are the primary election voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina who already have marked his name on their ballots, with more to come on Super Tuesday. They are the citizen last weekend in South Carolina who told a CNN reporter that he supports Trump despite all his indictments in federal and state courts because “As somebody who has accidentally broken the law myself… I believe that the legal system can be confusing,” as if Donald Trump was “confused” about the 91 different criminal acts he is accused of committing. They are the devotees who buy into the ex-president’s flagrant falsehoods about “a rigged election” in 2020— despite the fact that more than 60 courts have rejected the claim—  and who buy his unfounded folly about a federal justice system that the current president has “weaponized”— Trump has called his endless court appearances “Stalinist show trials carried out at the Joe Biden orders (sic)”— despite the fact that in every case, it was juries of Trump's peers, not the sitting president, who decided to put the man on trial.

What his acolytes overlook is staggering. When a far-right speaker declared at last week’s Conservative Political Action Convention, “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it,” they didn’t boo him off the stage, they put their hands together and clapped.

They lionize a man so detached from reality, so devoid of the truth, that he has the audacity to claim that he has been indicted more times than Al Capone, which is not just a lie, but a trivialization of his own alleged crimes. Capone was indicted for carrying concealed weapons, for racketeering, for violating Prohibition, and for the crime that put him behind bars, tax evasion. Those were transgressions against the law. Trump has been indicted for transgressions against the nation: tampering with an election, jeopardizing our national security, and playing a key role in the insurrection.

They lionize a man who, even more shamelessly, puts himself on a par with Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident who, after being sentenced to 19 years behind bars for “extremism,” suddenly died ten days ago in a Siberian prison. Complaining to Fox News about his huge financial penalty after being convicted of fraud in New York, he called it “a form of Navalny. It’s a form of communism or fascism.”

The comparison is sick, given that the closest Trump has been to any jail, at least so far, is his mug shot in Atlanta.

Maybe worst of all, they lionize a man who has threatened to strengthen the war criminal Vladimir Putin— whose closest allies are China, North Korea, and Iran— and throw America’s allies overboard. Ukrainian President Zelensky said in an interview just yesterday that he “can’t understand how Donald Trump can be on the side of Putin.” As David Andelman pointed out in his Substack blog Andelman Unleashed, “Madeleine Albright famously called America the ‘indispensable nation.’  Is former President Donald Trump  making America  the  irrelevant nation?”

Trump’s disciples are complicit in the abandonment of our democratic principles and, in the case of everything from Ukraine to NATO, our democratic allies. Ronald Reagan knew how fragile democracy is, how easily it can be destroyed. What he didn’t know was that five presidents later, a successor would try.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.