Samantha Collins 
Editor
Trying to find an ideological consistency to conservatism in the Trump era is a task most find increasingly daunting, especially for those of us old enough to remember Ronald Reagan.
In that sense, Donald Trump and JD Vance’s ambush of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House recently, and the fallout from it, was an interesting inflection point.Trump famously stole his most famous slogan—the one he has printed on the series of progressively larger red baseball caps he seems to wear on most occasions, and that showed up in Nazi font on Edgelord Elon Musk’s black one—from Reagan. And if there’s one thing anyone remembers about Ronald Reagan, it’s that he hated Russia. Seriously, go watch Reagan (though Dennis Quaid’s performance in it is a distant second to his best of 2024, in The Substance).
If you removed all references to Russia, communism, or Mikhail Gorbachev from Reagan, the authorized biopic would’ve been about five minutes long. And that’s how many of us grew up experiencing American conservatism: defined above all by its hawkish stance toward the Cold War’s big baddie, the USSR.And so it was weird to see the most famous co-optor of Reagan’s most famous slogan coming out hard against a proxy war with Russia. Again, Ronald Reagan loved those. If you grew up hating Reagan and being generally anti–American Empire, it was hard to know what to make of the Republican president and vice president angrily dressing down the leader of a country whose Russian anti-appeasement stance America’s national security apparatus had up until very recently supported wholeheartedly. A lot of the Trump administration’s policies present a similar conundrum.
I would submit that the best, and possibly the only, way to square the Trump-Reagan circle is to understand them both less as global ideological projects and more as generational examples of America’s recurring masculinity crisis. Are we really to believe that all the War on Terror–era feds and Cold Warrior military administrators that Trump has replaced with Fox News personalities were “too woke”? It’s much more likely that they just didn’t read bellicose—manly and masculine—enough for Trump’s tastes. (There’s a thousand pounds of irony to that coming from Trump, of course, but we’ll get to that.)
It’s only when you see right-wing reply guys talking about Zelenskyy “looking like a waiter” that Trump starts to feel like a proper echo of Reagan. (This post, from Frank Stallone, which imagines Trump telling Zelenskyy to “come back with a suit ya bum,” is a representative sample—the Frankster always being a great window into the id of your average MAGAchud.) Ronald Reagan saying “make America great again” was ostensibly about ending stagflation and doing more Cold War, but virtually all politicians of the time were saying basically the same things. Reagan managed to actually stand out by positioning himself as the masculine rebuke to the cuck (in modern conservative parlance) Jimmy Carter. Where Carter wore feminine sweaters and told Americans to stop worshiping consumption, Reagan was a movie cowboy who always wore a suit in public, told Americans consumption was what made us great, and brought back “Hail to the Chief” once he was elected. Carter urging self-reflection made him easy pickins for a made-for-TV politician like Reagan.
Trying to find an ideological consistency to conservatism in the Trump era is a task most find increasingly daunting, especially for those of us old enough to remember Ronald Reagan.
In that sense, Donald Trump and JD Vance’s ambush of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House recently, and the fallout from it, was an interesting inflection point.Trump famously stole his most famous slogan—the one he has printed on the series of progressively larger red baseball caps he seems to wear on most occasions, and that showed up in Nazi font on Edgelord Elon Musk’s black one—from Reagan. And if there’s one thing anyone remembers about Ronald Reagan, it’s that he hated Russia. Seriously, go watch Reagan (though Dennis Quaid’s performance in it is a distant second to his best of 2024, in The Substance).
If you removed all references to Russia, communism, or Mikhail Gorbachev from Reagan, the authorized biopic would’ve been about five minutes long. And that’s how many of us grew up experiencing American conservatism: defined above all by its hawkish stance toward the Cold War’s big baddie, the USSR.And so it was weird to see the most famous co-optor of Reagan’s most famous slogan coming out hard against a proxy war with Russia. Again, Ronald Reagan loved those. If you grew up hating Reagan and being generally anti–American Empire, it was hard to know what to make of the Republican president and vice president angrily dressing down the leader of a country whose Russian anti-appeasement stance America’s national security apparatus had up until very recently supported wholeheartedly. A lot of the Trump administration’s policies present a similar conundrum.
I would submit that the best, and possibly the only, way to square the Trump-Reagan circle is to understand them both less as global ideological projects and more as generational examples of America’s recurring masculinity crisis. Are we really to believe that all the War on Terror–era feds and Cold Warrior military administrators that Trump has replaced with Fox News personalities were “too woke”? It’s much more likely that they just didn’t read bellicose—manly and masculine—enough for Trump’s tastes. (There’s a thousand pounds of irony to that coming from Trump, of course, but we’ll get to that.)
It’s only when you see right-wing reply guys talking about Zelenskyy “looking like a waiter” that Trump starts to feel like a proper echo of Reagan. (This post, from Frank Stallone, which imagines Trump telling Zelenskyy to “come back with a suit ya bum,” is a representative sample—the Frankster always being a great window into the id of your average MAGAchud.) Ronald Reagan saying “make America great again” was ostensibly about ending stagflation and doing more Cold War, but virtually all politicians of the time were saying basically the same things. Reagan managed to actually stand out by positioning himself as the masculine rebuke to the cuck (in modern conservative parlance) Jimmy Carter. Where Carter wore feminine sweaters and told Americans to stop worshiping consumption, Reagan was a movie cowboy who always wore a suit in public, told Americans consumption was what made us great, and brought back “Hail to the Chief” once he was elected. Carter urging self-reflection made him easy pickins for a made-for-TV politician like Reagan.
