Trump should take Reagan’s lead and release his inner optimist

OPINION:

Now that former President Donald Trump has started to lean into the policy differences between himself and Vice President Kamala Harris — as he did last week in his speech in Asheville, North Carolina, in interviews with Breitbart and X owner Elon Musk and in his news conference on Thursday — the 2024 presidential campaign is starting to look like the 1980 presidential campaign.

In that campaign, a fading and clearly outmatched incumbent was opposed by a rival who inspired fervor in some and anxiety in others. The mainstream media still placed considerable weight behind the incumbent, and the campaign’s context was international turmoil and a desiccated domestic economy characterized by damaging inflation. The response from the incumbent party — then and now — was an offer to manage a graceful decline for these once-great United States.

What made Ronald Reagan a great candidate in 1980 was that he rejected the siren song of decline and decay and communicated optimism, hopefulness and the promise of the future to an American populace that had, in the previous 12 years, endured defeat in Vietnam, economic deterioration (especially in the steel and automobile sectors), rising crime and the assassinations of three of their political leaders.

Reagan rode in from the West, promising to put things right that had gone wrong. His campaign did not shy away from comparative politics, pointing out repeatedly that things were worse than they had been before President Jimmy Carter was elected and that Mr. Carter was weak and ill-equipped to lead the nation.

But the core of the campaign message was the hope and promise of a brighter future. Despite what you might remember or have heard, the campaign was hotly contested and close. As recently as three days before the election, a CBS/New York Times survey had the candidates within a single point of each other.

Fortunately, Reagan won the election by 10 points (the more things change, the more they stay the same), and the rest, as they say, is history. The United States went on a four-decade run of economic prosperity, technological achievement, foreign policy victories and unrivaled educational and scientific progress.

Like Reagan, the final piece of the campaign puzzle in this cycle for Mr. Trump is to embrace and share his optimism about the nation’s future. He has sizable advantages on issues important to the voters — the economy, immigration and social disorder. Those advantages are unlikely to shrink now that Ms. Harris is starting to share her policy preferences, especially given that her opening bid was the imposition of food rationing by the federal government. It’s tough to imagine how that would help her with undecided voters.

To close the deal with the American public, Mr. Trump needs to channel Reagan and share his optimism with them. To borrow from President George H.W. Bush, he must talk about “the vision thing.” People want their leaders to inspire and show them a path that will make them — and the nation — better. Very few are inspired by recitations of personal grievances or legal minutiae.

Nor is it enough to promise economic growth. Prosperity is not a terminal good. It is, rather, something that enables society to provide better education for the young, support innovation and technological development, ensure domestic and international tranquility, improve the lives of citizens and help foster social progress.

Reagan routinely summoned the vision of America as a shining city on a hill, borrowed from the Puritans in 17th-century Massachusetts, who in turn had borrowed it (of course) from the Sermon on the Mount. For him, it was shorthand for a sustaining belief in American exceptionalism. Mr. Trump also believes in that exceptionalism. He needs to summon and amplify that belief in this campaign’s last few essential weeks.

• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.