The Meltdown and the Master
Trump, Reagan and How 40 Years of “Freedom” Fuelled the Age of MAGA
Was it just me, or did you feel totally disoriented hearing the words of Ronald Reagan in the World Series ad?
He sounded so reasonable, like a real president. Heck, his vision of a peaceful world based on the free trade of goods almost made me nostalgic for the politics of the 1980s. Compare this to the lunatic tantrum of Donald Trump when the words of Ronald Reagan were shared with the nation. The Reagan years seemed golden by comparison. And then I came back to my senses.
Trump’s feigned rage about the Reagan message was classic right-wing gaslighting.
Donald Trump is not the antithesis of Ronald Reagan – he is the malignant spawn of the Reagan revolution. Trump’s decision to pick a fake fight over the words of Ronald Reagan is simply another manifestation of the dark carnival politics of MAGA - a world where everything is reflected back at you like a distorted funhouse mirror.
Ronald Reagan was another gas lighter. He claimed he would “Make America Great Again” when, in fact, his real focus was stripping away the protections of working Americans and paving the way for the oligarchs.
Paving the Way for MAGA
The heart of the Reagan revolution was a full-on attack on the regulations that protected worker rights and the environment. He kicked away the financial guardrails that protected wages, pensions and the banking sector.
Almost overnight, the financial predators moved in. New York City, which had been a basket case in the 1970s, quickly emerged as the centre of a new kind of smash-and-grab capitalism.
Limos and excess were the symbols of Reagan’s new America. And nobody personified this more than Donald Trump. Reagan helped create a new kind of corporate tycoon: klepto investors. They bought up venerable companies with junk bonds, stripped the assets and stole the pension funds of workers.
The corporate looting hit the American people hard as wages were targeted and unions busted. Then came the Savings and Loans scandal that wiped out 1,000 banks and destroyed $150 billion in assets. These assets represented the savings and mortgages of millions of Americans.
Canada didn’t see any of this kind of carnage because we maintained strong financial regulations.
However, the Savings and Loans scandal was small potatoes in comparison to the 2008 derivatives scandal, which wiped out savings, home ownership of millions. It caused the unemployment of 8.7 million Americans. The sale of toxic debt as assets had been one of the so-called miracle incentives introduced by Reagan.
The other key part of the Reagan revolution was his commitment to “free trade”.
Globalization wasn’t really about trading products; it was about the free movement of capital. The international trade agreements were written in a manner that prioritized the interests of investors over the rights of citizens and the domestic laws of nations.
A perfect example was the case of the additive MMT, which the United States banned as a threat to human health. Before Canada moved ahead with similar action, our country was sued under a NAFTA tribunal by the company, which claimed that such efforts to protect the public were “tantamount to expropriation.”
Canada was forced to pay out $13 million and post statements that MMT was safe.
Globalization promised that all boats would float. But what really floated were the super yachts of the oligarchs, as millions of jobs were offshored. The staggering increase in personal debt and economic precarity of workers drove down the expectations of all but the wealthiest few. This insecurity and resentment fed the rage of the Trump voting base
This growing political extremism was the subject of a 2022 study by the RAND Corporation that examined the impact of ever rising economic insecurity on the democratic stability of the United States.
They tracked the massive looting of worker wages and benefits that occurred following the 1980 launch of the Reagan Revolution. They studied what the financial benefits would have been for American workers if the attack on wages, pensions, and benefits hadn’t taken place.
The numbers are staggering: RAND has identified a loss of $1,144 per month for every worker over the last four decades. That represents $50 trillion taken from the pockets of working people and deposited into the accounts of the rising oligarch class.
A stable democracy simply can’t survive in a world where the powerful few own so much and the rest are left struggling to get by.
The Age of Dark Money
But there was another consequence of globalization. The free movement of capital provided cover for the emerging global kleptocracies. These crooks funnelled billions of stolen assets from countries like Russia into offshore investments. Thanks to the rules protecting capitalist investors, the money could be hidden in numbered companies with the names of the real investors protected.
That is how Donald Trump, a man deeply in debt and treated like financial kryptonite by the American banks, was able to recreate himself as the personification of the winner tycoon. Trump was a product of dark money from the Russian mob and the oligarch class.
Historian Timothy Snyder writes:
“He [Trump] only had a platform because Americans associated with the successful businessman he played on television, a role which was only possible because Russians bailed him out. Fiction rested on fiction rested on fiction. From the Russian perspective, Trump was a failure who was rescued and an asset to be used to wreak havoc in American reality… Trump, the winner, was a fiction that would make his country lose.”
The Meltdown and the Master
So what’s with Trump’s meltdown over the World Series ad?
He made his intentions toward Canada clear from the get-go. He has stated his determination to break our economy to force us to become a vassal state. Trump was never going to sign a proper trade deal with us, regardless of what his minion Pete Hoekstra claims.
I believe his meltdown is authentic. Trump is enraged that Canada hasn’t given in. As his country stumbles under the weight of his toxic trade wars, Canada continues to hold our ground. Trump needed a reason to rage against us.
And so, he chose Ronald Reagan.
In some ways, he was just paying tribute to the master.
In closing, I will leave you with this excerpt from author William Kleinknecht's biography of Ronald Reagan, The Man Who Sold the World, written 24 years ago, which describes the swamp that has given rise to Donald Trump:
“The bitter legacy of Reaganism – the subprime scandal, the near collapse of the financial system, the widening income inequality, the emergence of Lockdown America, the obscene inflation of CEO compensation, the end of locally owned media, market crashes, blackouts, drug company scandals, rampant greed and materialism – is all around us… Reagan laid the foundation for a new global economic order in which nationhood would gradually become meaningless. He enacted policies that helped wipe out the high-paying jobs for the working class that were the real backbone of the country. This supposed guardian of traditional values was the architect of an over-commercialized postmodern America that left so much of the populace psychically adrift. Reagan propelled the transition to hypercapitalism, an epoch in which the forces of self-interest and profit seek to make a final rout of traditional human values.”
Without the Gipper, Trump would never have stood a chance.
Charlie, as an American - this is so true. Most Americans admittedly do not know how devastating Reagan was.
Most Americans only have two thousand dollars in savings. Even before trump. They cannot afford to even go to Canada for a vacation.
The US is also the "no vacation" nation - companies are not legally obligated to offer any vacation days OR holidays. Trump even complained labor day was too much.
the federal minimum wage has been 7.25 since 2009. These meet the criteria of slave level wages. Many people hold multiple jobs or work in a "gig" economy to make ends meet.
Mental health? He destroyed it. Housing? Good luck affording a 2000 a month rent when the medium per capita income is 48000.
I could go on and on. America was one giant illusion - even it's democracy was an illusion.
Thank you so much for this post.
It is YOU who is a real fighter not just for Canadians but also for the AMERICAN people.
Hi Mr. Angus, Thanks for bringing Reagan-onics 101. i knew there was more to Reagan's legacy than just his stand on tariffs. he killed everyday American financially.