The one characteristic of Reagan and Trump that sets them apart from other presidents

Former President Donald Trump is on his way. President Joe Biden has collapsed and been pushed out of office before our very eyes.  The first man in history to be bluffed out of a pot when he was holding four aces. He had money in the bank. He was the incumbent. He was competitive in the polls. Who’d want to go to the mattresses with this quitter? 

Now he is replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris, who is so light, she’d float away if she was not tied down by DEI blimp lines. 

Let’s not buy the dishonesties that Biden stepped down from power like George Washington or Cincinnatus. That is just another liberal canard. Biden was pushed and he panicked and jumped. His fundraising had dried up, his internal polls had gotten shaky, and he was revealed to all the American people to be a decrepit and frail old man with memory issues in his one debate with Trump. 

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Comparing Biden to Washington is akin to comparing Albert Einstein to a one-cell Amoeba. 

Donald Trump reacts after being shot on the campaign trail in Butler, Pennsylvania, July 13, 2024. First lady Nancy and President Ronald Reagan greet supporters as the president leaves the Washington, D.C. hospital where he spent 13 days in March 1981 after being shot during an assassination attempt. (AP photo/Evan Vucci and Getty Images)

Politics is motion and Trump has been in motion for months while Biden has been as stalled as his EV charger mandate. Trump has broken free, running to daylight as Vince Lombardi used to say. 

We all know the phrase Make America Great Again started with the 1980 Reagan campaign, but Trump has done a good job stamping it indelibly as his own to great effect. 

And Trump, like Reagan, is running a joyous and fun campaign. They both enjoy and enjoyed the crowds. They both know the seriousness of their movements, but both have conveyed a deft sense of humor all the while making their case to the American people. 

Both have the sun in their faces. Reagan used to tweak Carter by telling crowds, "A man who tells you he enjoys a cold shower in the morning will lie about other things." Trump tweaks his opponents likewise. 

Both have shown public bravery after being shot and nearly killed. President John F. Kennedy called it, "grace under pressure." He got it from a book by Ernest Hemingway, "The Old Man and the Sea." When Reagan was shot, he was cracking jokes in the operating theater. When Robert Kennedy was shot in the head and lay dying, he whispered to an attending aide, "Is everyone all right?" Trump, after being shot in the head, looked at the massive crowd and raised his right fist shouting, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" 

All showed their own grace under pressure. 

Reagan was his own man too, but both he and Trump ran and are running from the same issue cluster, a gift to the Republican Party by Reagan in 1980. Before the 1980 campaign, the GOP had been all over the lot as a sometimes-big-government party, a sometimes-high-tariffs party, as a sometimes-high-tax party. That all changed after 1980. 

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Both men believe in federalism, who want to send power and authority back to the states. Both are prolife. Both support the Strategic Defense Initiative as now embodied by Israel’s Iron Dome. Both are populists, suspicious of the concentration of power by corporations or governments. 

Melania Trump kisses Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump after he finished giving his acceptance speech on Day 4 of the Republican National Convention (RNC), at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S., July 18, 2024. (REUTERS/Brian Snyder)

Both are confronted by an out-of-control Kremlin, bent on power, ready to invade Afghanistan or Ukraine.  

Both Trump and Reagan are pro-Israel. Both their opponents, Presidents Jimmy Carter and Biden were dour Arabists who were not trusted by Israel. Both were confronted by high inflation and national malaise. 

Tax cuts are and were important to both men. For Reagan, tax cuts were important as a means to lessen people's dependence on government. For Trump, because they stimulate the economy. Both are commendable reasons. 

We all know the phrase Make America Great Again started with the 1980 Reagan campaign, but Trump has done a good job stamping it indelibly as his own to great effect. 

In the most important sense though, both Reagan and Trump are their own men. Biden has often implied over the years, "I want to be like FDR," or "I want to govern like JFK." This screams self-doubt. 

Not Reagan or Trump. Both were too inner-directed, both too centered, too secure to ever be so self-doubting as to want to be other men rather than just themselves. 

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Acclaimed historian Craig Shirley is the author of the New York Times bestseller "December 1941" and six highly touted bestsellers about Ronald Reagan, including "Rendezvous with Destiny," which was named one of the five best campaign books of all time by the Wall Street Journal. As the Visiting Reagan Scholar at Eureka College, he is on the Board of Governors of the Reagan Ranch and lectures frequently at the Reagan Library. Shirley also wrote "Mary Ball Washington," which won  the People’s Choice Award from the Library of Virginia. He is now working on "The Search for Reagan" and an examination of the Donald Trump presidency.