Trump and Kim Jung Un have now been together face-to-face three times. The third meeting was a bit strange, certainly unconventional, and absolutely showed the World that the North Korean leader is pretty desperate to continue down the path of “getting along” with the leader of the United States — in this case, Donald Trump.
Trump detractors’ heads have been spinning, they’ve all been spewing green vomit, and their non-stop attacks of the President are escalating every day. Their crushing crescendo has drowned out any tidbits of good that might have resulted from that short back-slapping get together between those two leaders. Trump adversaries don’t care at all about facts. Their cries are NOT founded on facts, but are directly tied to their one and only political perspective: “Trump is Evil.”
This all reminds me of the press and political treatment of President Ronald Reagan. In fact, Reagan’s treatment by politicians (both Democrat and Republican) and by members of the press are eerily similar.
- Reagan could do NOTHING right;
- Reagan did EVERYTHING wrong;
- Reagan HATED the poor and American minorities;
- Reagan cared only about the Rich;
- Reagan was a stupid politician;
- Reagan was a cowboy that spurned conventional governing.
Does any of that sound familiar?
Reagan and the Press
They hated him, pure and simple.
Journalists — TRUE journalists — are politically neutral in their reporting and take pride in keeping readers, viewers, and listeners from ever knowing what their political persuasions are. Honestly, before 1980 (when Reagan was elected) journalists were fairly successful at hiding their politics. But with the election of the movie star/governor from California, all that journalist independence and integrity in reporting was immediately in the trash.
Want some examples?
“I used to say I thought if you were down on your luck and you got through the Secret Service, got in the Oval Office and said, Mr. President, ‘I’m down on my luck,’ he would literally give you the shirt off his back. And then he’d sit down in his undershirt and he’d sign legislation throwing your kids off school lunch program, maybe your parents off Social Security, and of course the Welfare Queen off of welfare.”
— ABC’s Sam Donaldson, who covered the White House during the 1980s, on Good Morning America, June 11, 2004.
“All of us who covered the Reagans agreed that President Reagan was personable and charming, but I’m not so certain he was nice. It’s hard for me to think of anyone as nice when I hear him say ‘The homeless are homeless because they want to be homeless.’ To my mind, a President should care about all people, and he didn’t, which is why I will always feel Reagan lacked soul.”
— UPI White House reporter Helen Thomas in the July 1993 Good Housekeeping.
“At the end of his presidency, a great many people thought he’d made the wealthy wealthier and had not improved life particularly for the middle class.”
— Peter Jennings talking to co-host Charles Gibson on ABC’s Good Morning America, June 10, 2004.
“Despite the accolades lavished upon Reagan since his death — for ending the Cold War, for restoring the nation’s optimism — his many detractors remember him as a right-wing ideologue beholden to monied interests and insensitive to the needs of the most vulnerable Americans.”
…
“Elected on a promise to slash taxes and crack down on freeloading ‘welfare queens,’ Reagan depicted government as wasteful and minimized its capacity to help people, ideas that survive today. Reagan also dealt a blow to organized labor by firing the striking air traffic controllers, and appointed Antonin Scalia, still the Supreme Court’s most conservative jurist.”
…
“Reagan’s weakening of the social safety net by dismantling longtime Democratic ‘Great Society’ programs arguably vexes his critics the most. By persuading Congress to approve sweeping tax cuts for the wealthy while slashing welfare benefits and other social services like the federal housing assistance program, Reagan was blamed for a huge surge in the nation’s poor and homeless population.”
— Beth Fouhy in an AP story headlined: “Many Still Troubled by Reagan’s Legacy,” June 9, 2004.
CBS’s Morley Safer: “You talk about a vision, and it’s some kind of abstract, vague idea. Did his [Ronald Reagan’s] vision include extraordinary deficits? Did his vision include cutting of the budgets for education and a back of the hand in terms of public education?”
Larry King: “History will not be kind to him?”
Safer: “No, I don’t think history particularly will be kind…I don’t think history has any reason to be kind to him.”
— CNN’s Larry King Live, June 14, 2004.
“After eight years of what many saw as the Reagan administration’s benign neglect of the poor and studied indifference to civil rights, a lot of those who lived through this week in Overtown seemed to think the best thing about George Bush is that he is not Ronald Reagan…There is an Overtown in every big city in America. Pockets of misery made even meaner and more desperate in the past eight years.”
— ABC’s Richard Threlkeld reporting from a section of Miami where there had been riots, on World News Tonight, January 20, 1989.
“Senator, don’t you believe, a lot of people do think that the ‘80s were an excess, which a lot of people got richer and people got poorer, and it’s now fair to redress that balance?”
— Sam Donaldson to Robert Dole on This Week with David Brinkley, Feb. 21, 1993.
“In the greedy excesses of the Reagan years, the mean income of the average physician nearly doubled, from $88,000 to $170,000. Was that warranted?”
— Bryant Gumbel to Dr. Richard Corlin of the American Medical Association, March 31, 1993, Today.
Reagan/Gorbachev
Reagan inherited a pretty nasty foreign policy mess in several countries — none bigger than that of the U.S./Soviet Union nuclear weapons arms race. Reagan — though no foreign policy expert — knew that Soviet Russia was the biggest danger the U.S. faced. He immediately set out to try to find a way to make peace with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. They held three historical meetings: the first in Geneva, the second in Reykjavik, Iceland, and the third in Washington D.C. I will not give you the U.S. media reports that followed each of the Gorbachev-Reagan meetings for the sake of your time. But know this for certain: the media excoriated Reagan for everything he did and didn’t do in planning for and his actions at each meeting. Reagan could do NOTHING right! (Exactly like Trump/Kim meetings as portrayed in today’s media)
In preparation for the Reykjavik meeting, unknown to the Americans Gorbachev prepared and presented a series of nuclear proposals regarding denuclearization by both Russia and the U.S. He did so because he wanted to catch Reagan by surprise. It worked. The Americans were planning intense meetings to find common ground, but not nearly the same common ground as the Russian contingency offered.
Gorbachev feared Reagan’s “Star Wars” plan called “SDI,” or “Strategic Defense Initiative.” The Soviets felt that if “Star Wars” was implemented, it would give the U.S. total defensive nuclear dominance over the Soviet Union both domestically and in Europe. Gorbachev insisted that “if” the U.S. completed and implemented the SDI, it would NOT be activated for the next 10 years. Reagan refused to accept those terms and abruptly left Iceland without any meaningful agreement with Gorbachev nor any future plans to meet again. (Trump took similar action leaving Vietnam abruptly from his meeting with Kim)
Of course, the rest of that story is historical. Gorbachev came to Washington later to continue negotiations. Finally, President Reagan made a trip to Germany and made this historical speech in which he sent a direct message to Gorbachev:
Not long after Reagan’s nuclear negotiations with Gorbachev and this speech in Berlin, the demise of the Soviet Union began, and the Berlin Wall came down.
The U.S. Media Weigh-In with Politicians, Too
No doubt the similarities between Reagan and Gorbachev’s relationship have been compared to that of Trump and Kim Jung Un. That’s not saying that Gorbachev and Kim have personal similarities, but the conditions surrounding U.S. presidential meetings with a foreign leader over nuclear arms issues are VERY similar in nature.
Also, Trump in Vietnam walked out of his second meeting with Kim in a similar fashion as did Reagan in Iceland.
What other similarities are there? Democrats and The Media!
- A spokesman for leading Democratic candidate and former vice president Joe Biden blasted Trump for “coddling” Kim “at the expense of American national security and interests.”
- Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who enjoys the second strongest following among the 2020 presidential aspirants, said the president was “squandering American influence on photo ops and exchanging love letters” with Kim.
- Senator Bernie Sanders, almost next in popularity to Warren, said the move had “weakened the State Department.”
- Samantha Vinograd, who served on the national security council under President Obama: “By shaking hands with Kim Jong Un at the DMZ with no preconditions attached, he’s really signaling that his metric for success at this point is the status quo, which is no long-range missile tests and no nuclear tests, but North Korea keeping its nuclear arsenal,” she said. Then she stated, “Kim has no reason to denuclearize, but every reason to push Trump for what he’s wanted all along, phased sanctions relief. North Korea under Trump is a normalized, nuclear power.”
- Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said on Twitter that while Trump and Kim met, “North Korea continues to build nuclear weapons. Another typical Trump ‘show.’”
- Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said “We’ve seen a history here,” she said. “Donald Trump announces these summits and nothing really comes out of it.”
- Despite the fact that there were four North Korean nuclear tests under President Obama and only one under President Trump, (none in almost 2 years) and Obama gave everything away to Cuba for nothing, Sunday’s editions of ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Sunday Today rushed to declare Trump’s historic meeting with Kim Jong-un at the DMZ to be nothing more than just a photo op. “[T]his was the dramatic headline, the dramatic photo that the President wanted. He’s a great showman. He pulled it off. There’s just no question about that,” proclaimed ABC chief anchor and Clinton lackey George Stephanopoulos. Stephanopoulos argued that there were no political or substantive outcomes from Trump’s previous talks with the North Korean dictator.
- There was an echo on NBC where host Willie Geist asked political director Chuck Todd: “Is there a plan from the Trump administration or was it a photo op?” Todd hinted at it being just that, noting: “The last two ended up looking as if they were photo ops in the end. We thought they could lead to something, but they didn’t.”
Summary
Here’s the question that everyone in the media is afraid to ask or answer: Is Donald Trump another Ronald Reagan? You know what: he just might be. Trump really liked Reagan. The two met several times and got along well. But that was long before Donald Trump ever became a politician. It’s humorous that both ended up with entertainment careers immediately prior to becoming politicians: Reagan as California governor after a Hollywood acting career, Trump as U.S. President after a short but very successful television stint.
Do the similarities stop there?
It’s fairly obvious that the Socialist Democrat Party and their communication arm — the Media — hope the current Reagan/Trump comparisons are short-lived. They cannot bear to think that Donald Trump might just pull-off a successful political career! His doing so would certainly complete the self-destruction of the floundering Trump-hating sycophants at MSNBC and CNN. There’s just too much money behind the Washington Post and the New York Times for them to disintegrate. But that’s NOT the Trump objective.
Donald Trump sincerely wants only an American success story full of wins for the American people!
He has NO political agenda other than that. And it drives the Left insane.
Here’s one last comparison of the two: Ronald Reagan’s most famous speech took place in front of a wall in Berlin in which he cried, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Democrats and their media henchmen cringe at the thought of Donald Trump ever being able to in McAllen, Texas or San Diego, California stand before network television cameras and say, “What do you think about this recently completed border wall between Mexico and the United States?”
Uncanny similarities between Reagan and Trump, don’t you think?
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