Donald Trump didn’t come up with “Make America Great Again.” He stole it. From Reagan. Just like he steals everything. He grabs whatever he wants without consent. Slogans, women, classified documents, elections, and countries. No original ideas, just a compulsive need to grab things that aren’t his. That’s his kink. Vlad knows.

When Ronald Reagan was in the Oval he was handed a 20-volume, 3,000-page manual created specifically for him by The Heritage Foundation to use as a guide during his Presidency. It contained 2,000 specific policy recommendations to move the federal government in a conservative direction. Reagan embraced this handbook of referenced instructions so often it became his administration’s compendium. And when Donald entered the White House, he too was handed a manual. What was once called The Mandate for Leadership was now titled Project 2025.
The Heritage Foundation advances right wing ideology and believes that poor Americans don't have things so bad. They have quietly spent decades laying the blueprint for Project 2025 to transform policymaking in Washington while the media hardly reported on it. Project 2025 is an updated Mandate for Leadership unequivocally more extreme in its callous indifference and cruelty which has been laid bare within the pages of the Mandate for decades. Yes, decades.
Reagan sold America a bullshit promise of trickle down economics and called it “Reaganomics”. What it inaugurated was a widened inequality, a gutting of public services, and a supercharged corporate power that slashed taxes for the rich, shrank the federal government’s role in racism, prioritized deregulations, and called social security programs entitlements. It is a trickle down to Trump’s pee-pee tape and why America has been sold out to Russia while the slow drip of human rights goes down the drain. Republicans played the long game. Reagan lit the match. Trump brought the gas. Both administrations distorted public perception and the media fell in line.
So let’s not pretend Reagan was some holy statesman. He was a TV actor turned president. An evangelical puppet. A conservative Republican. A corporate mascot in a fucking cowboy costume with a soft whisper and the alpha promise to “tear down this wall.” And yes, he used “MAGA” first in 1980. So when Trump slapped it on a red hat, in an easily accessible every day font from Canva, it wasn’t totally theft. It was a reincarnation. Only this time the acronym would become a full blown fucking anti democratic propaganda filled conspiracy-laden cult. Where Reagan had embraced a myth, Trump altered the alternative facts into truth.
And their First Ladies were two sides of the same Stepford coin, with one having done soft porn and rallying a birther conspiracy after stepping off the infamous golden escalator in red bottomed heels while the other was all buttoned up in handmaiden tales fashion wearing an intentional kitten heel.
Nancy “Just Say No” Reagan, the leave it to Beaver mom from the 50’s, and the War on Drugs with exactly zero nuance and maximum damage. Her little slogan helped supercharge mass incarceration, mostly of Black men, all while pretending it was about helping. It wasn’t. Unless you are a racist.
Then there’s Melania “Be Best” Trump, the third wife who arrived in America on an Epstein visa and married the world’s loudest clownish cyberbully while pushing an anti bullying campaign. Peak fucking irony. And the jacket? “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” worn to a child detention center where the Trump regime was separating children from their families. Honestly, she told the truth. She’s as cold as ICE.
These two women were not accessories. They were accomplices. Of cruelty. Of hypocrisy. Of racist policies dressed up in their heels and red suits on the taxpayer’s dime.
The Heritage Foundation wrote the script for these two actors and their spouses with the reality TV show dude taking it to a whole new level. A level we’ve never seen before. So do not be blinded by the white and for sure do not let the prayer breakfasts fool you. Both are the pattern from which racism is sewn into the fabric of America by way of non-separation of church and state, which ultimately allowed both the Ronald and Donald eras to wreak havoc and to wreck the country for anyone not born rich, white, and male.
MAGA was never about greatness. It was about going backward. It was about racism. It was about bigotry. It was about rapture. It was about a hierarchy, an oligarchy, and a white Christian nation.
And therein lies the story from Ronald to Donald and The Mandate to Project 2025.
So when someone tells me they’re a never Trumper, but instead a conservative Reaganite, I will side eye them faster than Hegseth will do a shot of whiskey. Because Reagan gave US Trump so it’s the same fucking difference. But I get it, Trump is the full-blown, tear-up-the-Constitution fascist, while Ronald was gentler in his approach and less harsh in some of his policies, making it all the more palatable than Donald’s delivery.
Donald has no class, is loud, obnoxious, bullish, and sounds like an idiot because he is a fucking moron. He has often likened himself to Reagan and he has frequently lied about his ties to the GOP legend. Trump so desperately wanted to be connected to the softer and more sophisticated Ronald that he even quote tweeted a real photograph with a fake quote from a suspended Twitter user.
Donald Trump has claimed that he knew Reagan “I have great respect for him. I helped him. I knew him. He liked me and I liked him.”
Reagan’s son Ron said “My father would not have known Donald Trump if Trump stood up in his soup.”
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Such a strong piece, drawing a line some republicans really don’t want to see. One of my favorite lines: “Where Reagan had embraced a myth, Trump altered the alternative facts into truth.”
As my 5 year old grandson would say “ROASTED”