Trump and Reagan: Speaking plain English to enemies

President Ronald Reagan strode in to his first press conference a mere five days after being sworn in as president. And right on cue, ABC’s Sam Donaldson, who would make his bones as a Reagan press adversary, asked this question:

“Mr. President, what do you see as the long-range intentions of the Soviet Union? Do you think, for instance, the Kremlin is bent on world domination that might lead to a continuation of the cold war, or do you think that under other circumstances detente is possible?”

Without missing a beat, the new President — a staunch critic of years of “detente” with the Soviets that he saw as a long-running sham — said this (emphasis added):

Suffice to say, the assembled White House press corps was stunned. Reagan biographer Steven F. Hayward recalls: “There was an audible gasp among the press corps in the briefing room. Some of Reagan’s own aides, cowering in the corners of the room, blanched. This was not the way world leaders talked about other nations.”

So it wasn’t — which was exactly what Reagan saw as part of the problem in dealing with the Soviets. Hayward writes that Reagan was determined to readjust American relations with the Communist Soviet Union and that he would “start by saying no and increasing Cold War tensions to crystallize the fundamental moral problem at the root of the conflict.” Reagan did this in several ways — ramping up the defense budget and proposing the Strategic Defense Initiative that would shoot down hostile missiles were only two. But the use of language — blunt, plain-speaking English — was a tool as well. In March 1983, Reagan would famously address the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, where he slammed the Soviets as follows (emphasis added):

The “Evil Empire” label, of course, was borrowed from the Star Wars movies. Again, this from biographer Hayward:

A New York Times columnist sputtered that Reagan’s words were “outrageous” and “primitive.” And so it went. The Reagan idea of the Strategic Defense Initiative drove the critics even further into a frenzy, with the New York Times deriding it as a “pipe dream” and the Chicago Sun-Times labeling SDI as “an appalling disservice.”

Eventually, of course, as Margaret Thatcher would say at Reagan’s funeral, the president won the decades-old Cold War “without firing a shot.”

All of this comes to mind in the wake of President Trump’s blunt words to North Korea’s rogue communist tyrant. And with all the predictability of the sun rising in the east, liberals and the media, just as they were with Reagan’s words, were appalled. Here’s the New York Times:

And that “chilling” story was a “news” story — not an editorial. Here’s an excerpt from the Times editorial on the subject:

Memo to the Times: When Japan did not surrender, Truman did indeed inflict a “rain of fire from the air” — and WWII came to an end as Japan surrendered.

Is North Korea in 2017 the Soviet Union in 1981 or 1983? No. Is President Donald Trump President Ronald Reagan? No, of course not.

But what is unchanged — completely unchanged — is human nature. Human beings can be good — but they are, in some cases, also capable of unmitigated evil. The question always is: How does the rest of a world filled with imperfect yet well-intentioned human beings deal with evil? If any lesson is to be learned yet again at this point, it is that the Bill Clinton/George W. Bush/Barack Obama approach of endless talks has provided exactly the end-situation those “talks” were supposedly guaranteed never to allow. Which is to say, while we have been talking politely to North Korea — and trusting it to keep its agreements — this mini-Evil Empire now has exactly what Americans were promised they would never have: nuclear weapons and the missiles that can deliver them to American soil.

Ronald Reagan in the 1980s changed the thought process of both Soviet leaders and American allies — not to mention America itself. The world and many American elites of both parties had cruised along for decades trying to make believe the Soviets were the political, economic, military, and most importantly the moral equal of America and the free world. Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had even delivered a commencement speech chastising Americans for an “inordinate fear” of Communism and Communists. The fear was, of course, with reason. The Soviet Union was both a literal and economic prison for its own citizens, a prison the Communists were doing their best to export all across the world. It was indeed an “Evil Empire” and the “focus of evil,” exactly as Reagan said.

But in using blunt, plain-spoken language, Reagan brought America and the world around to the realization that tolerating this kind of evil was not acceptable. More to the point, he made it abundantly clear to the Soviets themselves that their evil ways would no longer be tolerated.

No one wants to invade North Korea, least of all this president, who famously campaigned as an opponent of the Iraq War and for “America First.” But in making it plain that he will not sit passively by and accept a North Korean nuclear threat against America — and doing so in the blunt style that Reagan himself used — he is sending a plain warning to North Korea in the only kind of language Kim Jung Un and his cronies understand.

Good for him.