It was a good thing Ronald Reagan didn’t win the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 1976.
It’s also a good thing Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020.
It’s strange to say, but both of their losses turned out for the better – for themselves and, so far anyway, for our country and the world.
In my father’s case, as I’ve written before, if he had become president in 1976, he would not have been able to pull off his historic accomplishments – winning the Cold War without a fight, fixing the U.S. economy and making America strong and great again.
In 1976, the rest of the world was not ready to help my father tear down the Evil Empire. There was no Maggie Thatcher, no Pope John Paul and no Lech Walesa to join his crusade.
And when 1985 came along, instead of getting ready to negotiate those nuclear arms talks with Mikhail Gorbachev, my father would already have been out of office.
Other parallels between my father and Trump are easy to find.
Both were entertainers, natural showmen who understood and used the persuasive power of the camera and the media.
Both were shot and narrowly escaped death. Both believed they were saved by God to serve a higher purpose.
The most important parallel, though, is how Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump both bounced back after the rough-and-tumble political trials and tribulations they suffered during their first four years in office.
Both received clear electoral mandates in their re-election campaigns so they could carry out their original missions of making America great again.
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Based on what we’ve already seen in Week 1 of “Trump, Part 2,” it looks like he and the rest of the U.S. are going to be better off in the long run because he lost to Biden in 2020.
Biden royally screwed up everything he touched for four years, as President Obama warned us he probably would.
The American people suffered greatly because of Old Joe’s domestic screw-ups, but the people in Ukraine and the Middle East suffered tragically because of his foreign policy failures.
Trump’s incredible political comeback has saved us from the Democrats and their bad ideas for now, and put him in position to accomplish what he promised to do when he took office in 2016.
Back then, he couldn’t “Make America Great Again” because he didn’t know what he was doing yet and didn’t know who his enemies were in Washington and the Republican Party.
He was essentially an accidental president, a Beltway outsider who was often sabotaged by his own party and constantly under attack by the FBI, the Democrats in Congress and the liberal national media.
But as he proved with his history-making comeback, Trump spent the Biden nightmare years learning how to strengthen and broaden his MAGA movement and out-fox the enemy media.
He survived the lawfare of Biden’s corrupt Department of Justice and the bullets of would-be assassins. He made bold alliances with former Democrats like RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk and attracted millions of new votes from blacks, Latinos and even young people.
Like my father did in 1980, Trump won a clear mandate from the people in 2024.
He now has enough political and moral power to reverse or kill the harmful economic policies and woke social policies that Biden and his back-stage handlers enacted.
On Wednesday and Thursday President Trump was on top of the world.
He was still merrily signing a stack of executive orders and fulfilling his many campaign promises — everything from pardoning the January 6ers and banning central bank digital currencies to ending DEI in the federal government and ordering the release of the remaining JFK, RFK and MLK Jr. files.
In 1984 my father’s campaign was able to run and win 49 states on the brilliant theme of “Morning in America.” On Tuesday, I and tens of millions of other Americans woke up feeling like it was “Morning in America Again.”
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