What if it was all my fault?

Did Ronald Reagan beget Donald Trump?

Some months ago, I guess it’s a been a little over a year now, with the 2024 Presidential election bearing down on us, I self-published a book called “Nashua: How Ronald Reagan Led Us To Donald Trump.”

I’d never done self-publishing before and was correctly hesitant. How was I going to get a self-published book, even a timely one that I hoped would directly impact the 2024 Presidential election, into bookstores? Answer: I couldn’t!

Since I couldn’t seem to get a publisher to see what I saw — and of course, everybody did LATER (more on that in a minute) —- I got an offer I couldn’t refuse from a self-publisher and “Nashua” saw print.

Wouldn't we all be better off if America had listened - and READ?

It remains available on Amazon and while, at present, it’s received 11 5-star reviews from my readers, it hasn’t exactly kept the print shop folks over at Amazon all that busy. This is disappointing to me, not because I envisioned a best-seller — though I do think it’s a lively and compelling read — but because I genuinely thought our country needed to read it.

There, I said it. Even if it sounds like a brag even Muhammad Ali would wonder about. I really mean it.

Because I think that if they had been able to look past the very real failings of the Biden Administration, mostly the untamed border and the fact that he was a rapidly aging President who should have bowed out of the race much earlier and instead recognized the very real dangers to the America we’ve known for 250 years in what was promised by the incoming administration of Donald Trump, they would have voted him out, not in.

Having had a ringside seat to witness Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the Republican throne in the New Hampshire Primary of 1980 and having closely followed the after-effects of what now looks like a disastrous, scandal-ridden two-term Presidency, I thought there were troubling, frightening, terrifying parallels to what might lie ahead of us — should Trump prevail. So I wrote “Nashua: How Ronald Reagan Led Us To Donald Trump,” the only full-length political book I’ve written so far.

Only someone as stubbornly idealistic as me would think he could turn the relentless tide of history by some words, even really good ones, assembled on a page. You could say Alexander Hamilton and James Madison did with the Federalist Papers and maybe Thomas Paine did with Common Sense but they didn’t have to contend with Fox News and a President who had no shame in calling “fake news” at anything that he didn’t like and half a country seemingly willing to believe anything he said - “They’re eating the cats and dogs…” What? And we put this guy in the White House AGAIN?

It was my hope that readers might see in “Nashua” what I did in Reagan’s behavior and his in-office performance, the resulting arrests and prison sentences for almost every single member of his second Cabinet except one, Hugh Casey, who avoided prison by dying.

By remembering and truly examining the illegal, wrong-headed, unexamined things Reagan did in “Nashua,” that would make everyone certain to stay away from Trump II. Since I was right to suggest that Trump, like Reagan, had similarly prison-bound accessories (Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort among others) who would help him circumvent the law, the Constitution, the carefully crafted impediments to Presidential power that our Founding Fathers put in. They feared exactly the kind of ruthless, unprincipled demagogue that Trump turned out to be. Except he’s probably worse. And in Presidency Two, just getting started.

What I saw from Reagan was an instinctive — though maybe he didn’t realize it himself at the time — grasp of how to sway a crowd, how to play to the cameras, how your performance in debates was endlessly more important that whatever policy you might be touting at the time. In other words, he understood it was all a show and, being an actor, that was right up his alley. He could give a great speech, make a few self-deprecating jokes and seem like America’s kindly grandpa. That, evidently, was enough to convince America he would be a great President. He wasn’t.

Since it was abundantly clear that, like Reagan before him, Trump also had little grasp and even less interest in policy, he did understand how to put on a show, especially having had the run on national television he did with “The Apprentice.” He also had the special incentive of thinking of the many ways he could use the Presidency to enrich himself — something that either never occurred to Reagan or he thought wasn’t ethical. (I tend to think he never thought of it; there were many ethical issues with his Administration, particularly his second Cabinet.)

So, in writing “Nashua,” I felt like I was really on to something I’d never read anywhere else. I was about halfway through tying Reagan and Trump together when acclaimed historian Robert Dallek threw out this line: “Perhaps no one opened the way to Donald Trump’s Presidency more than Ronald Reagan” Bang!

“Nashua” comes out and all of a sudden, the Reagan-Trump connection seemed to be everywhere. I turn on Morning Joe and here are two jokers touting their new book “From Ronald to Donald: How the myth of Reagan became the cult of Trump.” WHAT?

Then, I see a New Yorker article “What if Ronald Reagan’s Presidency Never Really Ended?” And Max Boot’s new biography of Reagan, reviewed in the New York Times, talking about some of the crap Reagan got away with. And I see Craig Unger’s new book, “Den of Spies. Reagan, Carter and the Secret History of the TREASON That Stole The White House” all about the hostage deal Reagan’s people cooked up — even BEFORE he was elected — something I also wrote about in “Nashua.”

Also, there was Andy Borowitz’s delightful “Profiles In Ignorance” where Andy tracks down political stupidity like a bounty hunter and naturally, kicks off with Ronald Reagan, absolutely confirming all the things I’d written about in “Nashua.” I mean, really?

Then, in my research, I turn up an interview with former Democratic Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, a supposed Reagan pal, telling interviewer Eileen Prose in 1987: “There’s no question in my mind that Ronald Reagan was the worst (President). It was sinful that Ronald Reagan ever became President. Whenever we got over there (White House), he operated from a 3x5 card…He wasn’t deep in the subjects when you compared him with other Presidents. But I have to say he was a lazy fellow, never did his homework, never paid attention to the briefings, never well-prepared.”

It’s no small consolation for me that in some small way, I may have helped make all this happen. It just so happened that on that Saturday morning in the Nashua Telegraph newsroom in February of 1980, just hours before Telegraph Executive Editor Jon Breen was to take the stage at the Nashua High Gymnasium for the Reagan-Bush Debate and would magisterially screw it up, making Reagan look like The American Cowboy (and of course, he subsequently rolled to a New Hampshire Primary win and ultimately, eight years in the White House), Breen and I had one of those over-the-top, nut-cutting, balls-to-the-wall arguments that so raised his blood pressure, his Humpty Dumpty head lighting up like a Christmas ornament, that I’m certain he was still pissed off when he walked into the Nashua High gym a bit later on and his boorish behavior so set up Reagan’s dramatic “I’m paying for this microphone, Mr. Green” that set the crowd alight and turned Republican politics on its head. (Reagan had double-crossed Breen and the Telegraph by bring all the other Republican candidates out on the Nashua stage, yes, the ones who weren’t invited. A show-biz stunt! And it worked! He had been 21 points down, won going away!)

What if I pissed off Breen so much that what minimal self-control he had was lost when Reagan challenged him, I might have inadvertently skewed the New Hampshire Republican Primary and ultimately, the American Presidency, bringing us, years later, Donald Trump?

These are not easy thoughts to sleep on with a potential World War a few missile strikes away, ICE running out of control, a farce of a Supreme Court eager and willing to do Trump’s bidding, carefully making sure to look away as he swells his personal wealth with shameless sales of crypto, Bibles, sneakers, action cards and who knows what else.

This didn’t have to happen, America. All you had to do was read.

REAGAN’S NASHUA MOMENT - FEBRUARY 1980

John Nogowski’s “Nashua: How Ronald Reagan Led Us To Donald Trump” is still available on Amazon (assuming you can wake them up.)