It was big news over the weekend: the Reagan Foundation was asking both President Trump and the Republican National Committee to stop using Ronald Reagan's name in their fundraising.  The Democrats and NeverTrumps were very excited.

They shouldn't have been.  The people presiding over the Reagan Foundation are a mix of NeverTrumps and people who are part of the Bush family cabal.  The Bush family and its supporters hate Trump.  Their opinions about Trump's campaign are as meaningful as the Democrat party's views are.

The Washington Post broke the story:

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute formally asked the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee to stop using the 40th president's name and image to raise money.

The request came in response to a fundraising appeal sent from the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint effort of the Trump campaign and the RNC, offering two commemorative coins, one engraved with Reagan's image and the other with that of President Trump to anyone who donates $45 or more for Trump's reelection. The email was "signed" by Trump.

Melissa Giller, the Reagan Foundation's chief marketing officer, told Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty that the request to cease sales of the coins was made by phone to the RNC last week. Giller said the RNC agreed to stop using Reagan to solicit funds for Trump's reelection.

The foundation, which runs the Reagan Presidential Library near Los Angeles, was provided sole rights of the use of Reagan and his wife's names and images. While the foundation can't stop every time the Reagans' likenesses are used, it claims the right to stop groups from using them for political or commercial gain.

It was pretty shocking to learn that the Reagan Foundation was objecting to the most conservative president since Reagan.  On second thought, it wasn't just shocking; it was downright weird.

That is, it was weird until people looked at who's running the Reagan Foundation and discovered that the Foundation had fallen victim to a variation of John O'Sullivan's first law.  The original law, which the conservative columnist John O'Sullivan coined in 1989, states that "all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing."  The new variation is that "all organizations will over time become hostile to conservativism."

Mark Levin was one of the first to figure out what was going on:

2. Now, given the Washington Post's leftist agenda, and the conservative legacy of the great Ronald Reagan, this appears to me to be a huge conflict.

— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) July 26, 2020

4. And then I read, toward the end of the Post article, that Ryan would not comment for the article his paper wrote about the library he runs Well, I have spent many, many years promoting the Reagan Library and Foundation, I have had many very successful book signings there

— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) July 26, 2020

6. And the purpose of the Library is to enshrine President Reagan's fabulous conservative legacy for all time.Consequently, I am appalled that the Fred Ryan's Washington Post and the Reagan Library under Fred Ryan's chairmanship, would pull this publicity stunt on President Trump

— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) July 26, 2020

7.And I expect the thousands of Reagan alumni who worked for President Reagan share my concern. Mr. Ryan, decide who and what you want to be, but it's obvious you cannot be both the Washington Post publisher/CEO and the Reagan Library board chairman when there's a clear conflict

— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) July 26, 2020

It's not just Fred Ryan who's a problem.  In terms of support for Trump in his battle against Biden and the communists in Biden's train, here are some other problematic board members:

• Paul D. Ryan, who was of no use to Trump — or conservativism — between 2017 and 2019 because Ryan is basically a conservative Democrat who just wants to spend less money than other Democrats.  The two men do not like each other.
• Peggy Noonan, who can never get over her sense of revulsion to Trump and is a hardcore NeverTrump.
• George Shultz, who is a McCain partisan and is so hostile to Trump that he declined to endorse him in 2016.
• Robert Tuttle, who is another remnant of the George W. Bush administration, and who endorsed Hillary in 2016.
• Lachlan Murdoch, who runs Fox News, donated to Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign.  He's also a George W. Bush–supporter.  (This makes him better than his brother, who no longer works at Fox News, and who donated $1.23 million to Biden's campaign.)
• Gerald Parsky, who is part of the Bush cabal.  He was also a McCain-supporter and, before that, a Richard Riordan supporter.

Those are just a few of the board members whose bios I checked out.  I'm sure there are many others on the board who are core conservatives, who have no problem with Trump, or who even support Trump.  However, with so many NeverTrumps on the board, it's scarcely surprising that they would try to deprive Trump of the opportunity to campaign using the name and likeness of the only other president who came even close to Trump's conservatism.

Here's a final thought: Reagan was the president of the United States of America, not of a foundation or a library.  The Foundation may hold his documents and be the guardian of his image, but that does not give it the right to withhold any part of his public life or image from the American people — or from an American president who wants to remind the people that, just as Reagan stood against worldwide communism, President Trump is making a last, desperate stand against domestic communism.

Image: National Archives and Records Administration.