Bret Baier, chief political anchor of Fox News, President Trump’s favorite network, insists he isn’t living in some alternate reality. He knows that our current President is louder, cruder, and ruder than Ronald Reagan, “a counterpuncher” from New York far different from his genial Republican predecessor. Baier is not handing Trump the Nobel Prize for a North Korea summit that hasn’t even happened yet, and he footnotes every conversation with a caution that we don’t know how the Trump story turns out. “I’m not saying that Trump is Reagan, or Reagan is Trump,” he said when we met the other day, in his corner office at the Fox bureau in Washington, not long after handing me a signed copy of the new book he wrote with Catherine Whitney, “Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Union.”
Cautions dispensed with, Baier, who has carved out a profitable sideline moonlighting as a Presidential historian, reeled off what he sees as striking parallels between Trump and Reagan, and his book makes much of everything from their “similar rhetoric in big speeches” to tough media coverage and a shared penchant for being “underestimated.” Decades after many of the details about precisely what happened in Reagan’s eight-year Presidency, in the twilight of the Cold War, have faded from public memory, he remains an exalted figure in the Republican pantheon. Most significantly, Baier argues, Reagan met with the Soviets, but only after years of talking tough about the “evil empire.” A generation later, Trump may be poised for his own expectation-scrambling summitry with the North Korean leader, an example Baier and some Trump partisans portray as a modern-day equivalent of Reagan’s policy of “peace through strength.” “Heads were exploding back when Reagan was elected, and heads are exploding now,” Baier said, as we talked about the twin challenges of covering Trump, a President “unlike any we’ve ever seen,” and writing history amid the “fire hose” of Trump-era news.
Right before our conversation, Baier had appeared on the radio with Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk-show host who reveres Reagan so much he refers to him as Ronaldus Magnus. Limbaugh waxed on to Baier about “the parallels” between two different men, and Baier agreed. “Exactly,” he said. “One thing you can say is, like Reagan, Trump has changed the paradigm. I mean, the jury’s still out on the end result, but the game changed in the way Washington worked.” Baier, who devotes the entire last chapter of his Reagan book to a discussion of Trump, would go on to sell the Reagan-Trump comparison throughout the week, as his book launch continued, chatting amiably about it with the ladies of “The View,” nodding along with his colleagues at “Fox & Friends.” “Bret Baier talks Reagan-Trump parallels,” Fox touted in the video clip from its show, “The Five.”
Soon after our interview on Monday evening, Baier would head over to the Marriott Marquis hotel for his book party. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao showed up, as did White House adviser Kellyanne Conway. It was so crowded with Trump luminaries, it could have been a Cabinet meeting.
Since the start of Trump’s outsider campaign to remake the Republican Party in his own image, his partisans have branded him a Reagan for our times—a brasher and brusquer one, perhaps, but like Reagan in that they were both renegades who fought the party establishment and politically revitalized the G.O.P. with a new coalition of former Democrats like themselves. This is the “heads were exploding then, heads are exploding now” part of Baier’s argument.
An establishment figure no less than James Baker, Reagan’s first-term White House chief of staff, has said that Trump’s ascendance reminded him of Reagan’s; he made the remark during a lunch before Nancy Reagan’s funeral, in 2016, as Trump was in the midst of trouncing sixteen other Republicans to take the nomination of a party whose leaders had hardly welcomed him. In an interview with me last year, Baker recalled making the point to Brian Mulroney, who served as the Prime Minister of Canada in the nineteen-eighties, at the lunch. “I said I saw some parallels here with the way Reagan came up,” Baker told me. “I was an establishment Republican when Reagan was coming up, and we were really fearful—we were afraid he was going to get us in a nuclear war. Here was this Grade B actor—‘Bedtime for Bonzo,’ I mean, my God. [We thought] the world was going to end, and that turned out not to be the case.” (The observation got Baker a meeting with Trump after Mulroney, who had become, unbeknownst to Baker, a friend of Trump’s, mentioned it to the future President; when they met in the spring of 2016, Baker handed Trump a two-page memo full of advice, which Trump promptly ignored.)
But, for the most part, the heads exploding at the Reagan-Trump parallels have been those of staunch Reaganites, many of whom hate the comparisons between the sunny, optimistic Cold Warrior they still idolize and the wheeling-and-dealing, narcissistic America Firster now in the White House. During the campaign, Reagan’s son Michael responded to the comparisons. “Are you a Trump Republican or are you a Reagan Republican?” he asked, on NewsmaxTV. “Because you cannot be both.” When I asked Peggy Noonan, the Reagan speechwriter who is now a Wall Street Journal columnist, what she thought of the analogies between the two popping back up now, she e-mailed me a copy of a piece she had written, from 2016, headlined, “Donald Trump Is No Ronald Reagan.” Not only is Trump not Reagan, she argued, “you sound desperate and historically illiterate when you think he is.”
Other veterans of the Reagan administration agreed with Noonan. “The idea that Reagan was taking on the establishment is, excuse me, horseshit,” a former senior Reagan White House official told me. Kenneth Adelman, an adviser for Reagan’s Soviet summits and the Reagan-appointed director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, offered a quick rebuttal to those intent on discerning present-day echoes between Trump and the Gipper. “Number one,” Adelman told me, “Reagan was a Republican. Number two: Reagan was a conservative and it’s clear Trump is not. Number three: Reagan was a very, very decent person…. And number four: basically, Reagan was very competent.”
When I called Bill Kristol, who came to Washington as a young Reaganite, in 1985, and later founded the influential conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, he was thinking of a very different Presidential comparison. Kristol has been an unrelenting Never Trumper since Trump announced his Presidential campaign, and he certainly wasn’t about to concede the analogy, no matter how stretched, between Trump and the President that he still idolizes. With this week’s one-year anniversary of the special counsel investigation into Trump and his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia in mind, Kristol told me the Republican whom President Trump most resembles is not Ronald Reagan, but Richard Nixon. “I would say Trump is more like Nixon, though it’s unfair to Nixon in that Nixon was a more serious person,” Kristol said. “He’s more Nixon than Reagan, but of course a much degraded version of Nixon.”
Trump’s unexpected nuclear diplomacy with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, whom he so recently taunted as “Little Rocket Man,” has brought back the Trump-Reagan debate just in time for Baier’s book tour. Indeed, Baier has taken to pointing out in his appearances that Trump’s scheduled June 12th summit with Kim will take place on the anniversary of Reagan’s famous speech, in 1987, at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, the one in which he urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” over the objections of his State Department. “Wow, that’s eerie,” Limbaugh responded when Baier mentioned the coincidence.
Watching Baier’s appearances to promote the book, I found myself wondering what Trump would make of all the Reagan talk. In Republican circles, Reagan’s brand remains as golden as the lettering on Trump Tower. The endless Fox News segments with pictures of Reagan and Trump flashing on screen together certainly give the impression of a well-timed and not particularly subtle image-burnishing campaign. Then again, on a network that often outright celebrates the President, Baier has tried to maintain a reputation as a hard-questioning newsman, and he said in our interview that “it pains me” to hear Fox called “state TV” for the Trump Presidency. “I have not gotten an interview with the President, and it’s five hundred thirty-four days since I did one with candidate Trump, not like anybody’s counting,” he pointed out.
But it is, of course, not lost on Baier that many of his Fox colleagues are Trump’s chief promoters, rewarded with Presidential call-ins and White House dinner invites. Baier himself was photographed with Trump over Thanksgiving, at Mar-a-Lago, and he recently played in a golf foursome, at a Trump golf club in Virginia, with the President and his budget director, Mick Mulvaney. Still, Baier is by no means the Presidential confidant that some of his fellow Fox stars have become. A report in New York magazine that was released before we met claimed that Sean Hannity, the Fox prime-time star, talks to the President on the phone as frequently as several times a day, often at night before they go to bed. Baier noted in our conversation that he and Hannity were from entirely different parts of the Fox operation, as separate as News and Opinion at the New York Times or any other newspaper.
Nonetheless, Baier showed up as a guest on Hannity’s show the night after our interview. Hannity opened the segment by playing clips of Trump vowing to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea and of Reagan insisting he would “trust but verify” when dealing with the Soviets. “What’s amazing,” Hannity enthused, “is the President’s tough rhetoric toward North Korea proves what Ronald Reagan spoke about in the nineteen-eighties concerning the evil empire.” “The similarities are really stark,” Baier agreed later in the show.
Eventually, after a few more minutes of noodling over Reagan and Trump, Hannity turned inward, to the subject of Fox itself and whether it is possible to be anything other than a Presidential promoter on the network indelibly associated with the President. “How much crap do you take for me being opinionated?” Hannity asked Baier.
“On a scale of 1 to 10? It’s a good six,” Baier responded.
Hannity laughed. “Just tell everybody you’re news,” he said, “I’m opinion.”
