"Stop the steal" - Really?

Did Donald Trump 'lift" a phrase from President Ronald Reagan? Read all about it in "Nashua: How Ronald Reagan led us to Donald Trump"

It was a windy February morning when I saw Ronald Reagan walk into the newsroom at the Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph some 44 years ago for a very brief meeting with our Executive Editor. I didn’t know then that some day I’d have to write about it. What I also didn’t know until I started doing the research for my new book “Nashua: How Ronald Reagan led us to Donald Trump” was that there were so many odd and scary parallels to our political scene today.

Then one afternoon, I came upon this:

President Ronald Reagan addresses the AFL-CIO on March 30, 1981. LISTEN CLOSELY

Here’s the end of President Reagan’s speech in case you didn’t catch it all.

"As I ask all Americans, in these months of decision, please join me as we take this new path. You and your forebears built our nation. Now, please help us rebuild it. And together, we’ll make America great again.”

Funny enough, I seemed to notice that exact, precise phrase adorning these tacky red hats all over the place. Was it a coincidence? An unconscious “borrowing” of a time-honored phrase of one of America’s beloved - at least, at the time - Presidents?

Or, to use a phrase that later became popular for all sorts of other “reasons” - was it time for somebody to speak up and, to coin a phrase: “Stop The Steal.”

To be perfectly honest about it, I was pretty disgusted with Presidential politics in 1980. I was a Journalism student at Rivier College in Nashua, right in the middle of Watergate, where I would read, on a daily basis, it seemed, of the rampant, dishonest, revolting things coming out of the Nixon White House.

The bugging, the dirty tricks, the slush fund of money that went out to poison the campaigns of other candidates… And that was just what made it into the newspapers, thanks in large part to the dogged reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, who went so far out on a limb to report this story, many of the editors of their own paper didn’t believe what they were doing.

The author, sharing tales of my award-winning “Gadsden County Times” with Bob Woodward

Every year, I’d have my Journalism class watch “All The President’s Men” and I was greatly encouraged to see that they loved the film and the idea of genuine journalists working hard to get the story. And it wasn’t just, this guy said this, let’s write it. They had to confirm, sometimes with two, three sources before they reported it. As author Joseph Heller once suggested, “I bet they were better sourced than they let on.”

If you want to have your ears peeled back, sit back and watch “Watergate: Blueprint For A Scandal” - a CNN series available on Max. I followed Watergate pretty closely, taught “All The President’s Men” every year and seeing this program now, all these years later with all the loose ends tied up, it is terrifying how close we came to Presidential disaster. I knew it was bad. Watch this show and see how much worse it might have been, had Nixon not been stopped.

Which is one reason I found myself writing “Nashua: How Ronald Reagan led us to Donald Trump” over these many years since seeing Reagan’s perfectly coiffed mane come charging up the newsroom steps that February morning. Looking at my “Nashua” file on my trusty old laptop, I have over 90 different versions, takes, re-writes, screenplay ideas of essentially the same story that I just had to tell, a story that I’d hammered on for years, bugging friends, former colleagues, co-workers to read, discuss, debate, to see if what I was seeing and reading and thinking was really how it was.

Namely, seeing how Reagan and his last-minute complete upending of the Telegraph’s carefully worked out and agreed upon plan for the mano-a-mano debate with the always well-mannered George Bush went into the toilet, not only ruining the event but Bush’s candidacy to boot. Bush was so embarrassed, he flew directly back to Houston and didn’t even campaign the final days of the New Hampshire Republican Primary which he actually led until that debate.

And to me, Reagan’s double-crossing, last-minute stunt, which miraculously helped him come out a folk hero that night, was worth looking into. Particularly since echoes of that moment have seemed to echo through the years and all the campaigns since.

That’s what “Nashua: How Ronald Reagan led us to Donald Trump” is all about. And it’s also, I think, about how history - which a lot of students say is ‘boring” - actually is constantly moving, changing, how we’re always re-evaluating, re-thinking about things as we learn more, view things from a different perspective.

I remember the first time I read Esquire’s Charlie Pierce call Robert E. Lee “a traitor” I was genuinely shocked. That wasn’t the way he was portrayed in the history books I grew up with; he was top of his class at West Point and was genuinely tormented when President Lincoln supposedly asked him to take over the Northern Army and Lee said he couldn’t go against his home state of Virginia, which happened to be a slave-holding state. So he went Confederate. Or that was how it was explained to us back then.

To many Americans just a few years ago, Ronald Reagan was thought of as one of our most significant Presidents. Even though almost his entire second-term cabinet ended up in prison (look it up!), and he effectively dodged the Iran-Contra scandal, the many other things he did - or allowed - have dropped him in the eyes of current historians. A recent poll of historians reported on Fox News (!) dropped him to 18th, behind Joe Biden!

Thursday’s debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden will surely be reported differently, depending on what network you choose to watch. Both men are old, way older than we ever would have imagined running for President.

When Ronald Reagan decided to try for the Presidency an almost unprecedented third time in 1980 he was 69, written off by some as way too old. As I wrote in “Nashua” - “What we thought then, we don’t think now.”

So, did Donald Trump “steal” that idea from Ronald Reagan? Has anybody asked him? Would they get a straight, honest answer if they did?

By the way, this was something else really creepy about discovering that “Make America Great Again” moment from Reagan. He delivered that speech at the Washington Hilton, speaking at the National Conference of Building Trades Department, AFL-CIO on March 30, 1981.

Then he went outside and got shot. You could look it up.

“Nashua: How Ronald Reagan led us to Donald Trump” is available now in three formats on Amazon. Come up and see me in Thomasville, Ga. on October 19, I’ll be doing a book signing for “Nashua: How Ronald Reagan led us to Donald Trump.”