In 1981, one of Washington’s most respected Democratic elder statesmen dismissed the new president as an “amiable dunce.” Clark Clifford, a former Secretary of Defense, said it at a dinner; the phrase leaked and became the era’s shorthand. Kind, but foolish. Likable, but lost.Forty years later, Gallup found that 69% of Americans, nearly half of Democrats among them, ranked Ronald Reagan one of the best presidents in the nation’s history. Today, the same voices reach for nearly identical language about President Donald Trump. History may be preparing the same verdict.I did not watch the first act from an American living room. I was born in 1972 and grew up in the Soviet Union, where Reagan was the enemy — propaganda drew him as a warmonger, a cowboy, a foolish actor with his finger near the button. Then the Union collapsed, and the man the world had feared became, almost overnight, beloved.
TRUMP HATES WAR BUT LOVES WINNING. IRAN IS ABOUT TO DISCOVER WHY THAT MATTERSSo when people set Reagan against Trump today — “that was a real president, not this reckless clown” — I recognize something. Most who make the comparison either don’t remember the 1980s, weren’t in America then, or, like me, watched Reagan through a hostile lens from the other side of the Iron Curtain. I remember the attacks. The similarities are difficult to ignore.The labels haven’t changed
