The movie Reagan just opened.  It’s wonderful, and the scene where he calls for Mr. Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall!” is amazing.

Entertaining, heartwarming, and nostalgic are words that come to mind.  A man of faith who loved America, Ronald Reagan’s historic persona is a president who reached across the aisle and struck chords that resonated with Democrats and Republicans alike — hence the phrase “Reagan Democrats.”

Did Reagan believe in American exceptionalism?  Perhaps, but his actions on the world stage to combat the Soviet Union’s desire to smother the world under communism made clear that if he did, he saw America’s exceptional nature not as privilege, but as responsibility — not just to fellow Americans, but to all the world.

Reagan’s grasp of that responsibility best expressed itself in his ability to see with clarity across a wasteland far greater than the aisle now separating American Democrats and Republicans.  More than the current American political arena, sadly abandoned by once proud journalists to degraded hyperbole, ad hominem dung-slinging, bald-faced lies, and democracy-destroying lawfare, Reagan faced the Cold War, a nuclear stalemate between “monstrous super-states ... possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds.”

It was during the Cold War, the years of the greatest existential threats to mankind’s survival, that President Ronald Reagan reached across a bottomless pit filled with nuclear warheads to Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party and president of the Soviet Union.  And World War lll was averted.

We need that kind of leadership now more than ever.  Trump wants us to believe he is that leader.

Maybe it’s easier for me to ignore Trump’s hyperbole and bombastic personal attacks in part because I grew up not far from where he did.  That means I know a little bit about who he is. 

I grew up on Long Island, 20 minutes or so away from where Donald Trump grew up.  A handful of years younger than Trump, I was 10 years old during the burning of Watts in the L.A. Riots of 1965; 12 during the Long Hot Summer of race riots that burned across the country in 1967; and 13 in 1968, when my hometown erupted in race riot–fueled flames.  That was the summer I quit my paper route and got my first “real job.”  But I missed a week of work because my parents were afraid to let me out of my house to walk to the bus station.

I went to a cool high school; we even had a planetarium.  But it was New York 50-plus years ago, and sometimes things got a little rough — like when pot-smoking, acid-dropping hippies joined with the anti-war/anti-establishment SDS radicals and were met by flag-wearing Reactionaries who called the peace sign the footprint of the American Chicken.

The good ol’ days weren’t really so good.

Identity politics of the day would have called us Feminists, Hippies, Long Hairs, Reactionaries, Greasers, Jocks, and Gear Heads.  There were the Civil Rights Movement, the Sexual Revolution, the Feminists Movement, the Anti-Government, Anti-Establishment, and Anti-War Movements.

And there were college protests.

On April 30 of 1970, President Nixon announced that despite troop reductions, the Vietnam War was to expand, with American troops sent into Cambodia.  On May 1, President Nixon called college protesters “bums.”  Protesting the escalation of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, an estimated 1,000 Kent State University of Ohio student protesters surrounded the ROTC barracks on campus.  Tensions escalated, and the barracks were set on fire.  The National Guard pushed the students back into dormitories, and on Sunday, May 3, Ohio’s governor, James Rhodes, vowed to “eradicate the problem” of protests on campus.  On Monday, May 4, National Guard troops confronted perhaps as many as 3,000 protesters.  Things spun out of control, and ultimately, the Guard opened fire.  Four college kids — “bums” — were shot dead.

Yes, Trump and I, to quote an old line, lived in “interesting times.” 

And New York was an “interesting” place.  It was where rude, crude, and socially unacceptable behavior was, well, not so unacceptable.  For both men and women, that behavior was just part of being strong in a world where only the strong survive.  The quiet and reserved got run off the road by bombastic, vulgar, hyperbolic drivel spewed with great energy, emotion, and vulgarity.  Was that right?  No, not even a little. 

Is the political discourse, from both sides of the aisle today, any better?  No, not even a little.

But between then and now, America elected Ronald Reagan as its 40th president.  The movie about his life makes clear just how different from today’s candidates Reagan was as a man and as president of the United States.  He truly was special.

Trump is called lots of things other than special.  But the similarities between Ronald and Donald, not the least of which is their love of America, are too obvious to deny.

Reagan understood that America’s “deeper pockets” meant Russia could not survive a hugely expensive arms race to include SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative.  Reagan got it right: the arms race bankrupted the Soviet Union and led to its economic collapse.  America won, and the Cold War ended without a single bomb exploding on American — or Russian — soil.

In much the same way, Trump’s tariffs and economic sanctions crushed Iran’s financing of its terrorist proxy’s ability to wage war and shut down the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.  But Biden and Harris lifted Trump’s sanctions and flooded Iran with petro-dollars that then funded its proxy’s October 7 attack on Israel.

October 7–type attacks don’t just include the collateral civilian deaths of conventional war.  They specifically ignore military targets and instead wage war against civilian populations with the murder of children and the aged, the rape of women and girls.  Terrorism is an iteration of the hell of war that scars the human spirit.

Weakness invites aggression.  New Yorkers know that.  Trump bolted shut the door against such attacks with his peace-winning weapons of economic sanctions.  The Biden/Harris administration’s policy of appeasement blew that door right off its hinges.

How do American feminists vote for the ticket that enabled that attack?

The Biden/Harris abandonment of Afghanistan and the unconscionable surrender to the Taliban of over $65 billion of American armaments emboldens and enables the Taliban to export terrorism outside and beyond Afghanistan’s borders.  Biden’s and Harris’ gifting of those weapons made the woman-enslaving Taliban the most powerful and wealthiest arms dealer of terrorist regimes in the world. 

How do American men and women ignore that and vote for the policies of that ticket?

Trump sounded the alarm on fentanyl, and he used the threat of tariffs to get the Mexican government to help secure our southern border and strangle the fentanyl trade.  But in the last three and a half years, Biden and Harris have opened the border, allowing over 10 million unvetted illegals, along with the fentanyl that kills over 100,000 Americans every year, to come into the U.S.  

How do the parents, family, and friends of those dead fentanyl victims vote for Harris?

Reagan and Trump both won wars before the first shot was fired.  They won them without guns, bombs, bullets, or casualties.  Peace through strength saves lives — millions of lives across the world.  Leading from behind replaces the leader of the free world with a vacuum...but not for long.

It’s our turn to tear down the walls the governing elites built to separate us, to tear down the walls of virtue-signaling and do what’s right, to tear down the walls of identity politics and embrace peace and prosperity.

The truth is that despite the similarities of their policies, Trump is not now and never will be another Reagan.  I get that.  So if The Donald calls with an invitation to dinner, feel free to tell him, “Thanks anyway, I plan to do my hair that night.”

But leading the free world is not a privilege, it’s a responsibility.  America and the world need Donald J. Trump to be president again.  Do whatever you want with your hair, and tell your friends whatever you need to, but put on your grown-up feminist and peace-loving patriot pants and vote Trump.  Then hug your kids and get a good night’s sleep.

Mike Kirkwood is currently polishing the final chapter of his book The Rationality of Christianity.  His next project will be to find a publisher for it.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.