No other two chief executives in my lifetime have had a more positive impact on our world than Mr. Trump and Ronald Reagan.  They do share some similarities, but there are also some interesting differences between the two.  Both were media celebrities prior to moving into the White House, but for seriously different reasons.

Trump is hardly an ideologue.  He’s mostly just an experienced problem-solver and negotiator.  Reagan, on the other hand, was the paragon of American conservatism.  The difference is that by the time Trump became president, the Cold War had long since run its course — whereas Reagan was in it up to his eyeballs.

Although Trump is the first, and thus only, non-politician who was also not a famous general ever to be president, movie actor and TV personality Reagan was also the president of a union (Screen Actors’ Guild) and then governor of the nation’s most populous state.  Nelson Rockefeller’s lust for the presidency was thwarted by his divorce since at that time, no president had ever been divorced — until Reagan.  Since Reagan, no other president had been divorced — until Trump.

When Reagan assumed the presidency, the nation had been reeling from unchecked inflation, which amounted to 64% dollar devaluation from 1973 to 1979, as per the online inflation calculator.  Remember “Whip Inflation Now”?  That was Gerald Ford’s pathetic contribution to the effort.  A few years then passed until Reagan was inaugurated and promptly appointed Paul Volcker to be the chairman of the Federal Reserve.  Then followed an empirical demonstration of how to arrest inflation: shock therapy.  Volcker’s Fed jacked up interest rates, knowing that a recession would be next to happen.  With the value of money significantly stabilized, the natural forces within the economy quickly brought an end to the recession.

Trump’s entry into the political limelight occurred under somewhat different circumstances.  Unchecked illegal immigration was at the top of the list.  Having a Biden-Harris interlude further emphasized what was done to the nation by the various non-Trump administrations: massive increases in government involvement in what had traditionally been private affairs, and at a tremendous cost.

Until Trump, the political parties would typically order candidates from Central Casting.  They would then go through the usual motions of pandering to their contrived constituencies — you know, the “communities.”  You got your Gay Community, the Hispanic Community, the Disabled Community and of course the Black Community.  Trump, on the other hand, has only one constituency: the American Community.

Sure, special interests have benefited from some of Trump’s work.  Soybean farmers just got bailed out of a jam, but they hardly represent a vast voting bloc.  It just makes sense to reopen a mutually beneficial commercial path.  Not only is Trump improving the situation on the ground, but he’s also revealing the abject incompetence of the pre-existing political establishment.

Will this continue after Trump is termed out?  Sure, he’s totally unique, but there are others capable of following Trump’s lead.  The point is that he has opened a path for others to follow.  Reagan failed to do that.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.