Trump: I'm like Ronald Reagan to Obama's Jimmy Carter
Donald Trump sees comparisons between 2016 and 1980, casting himself as Ronald Reagan (but better, of course) and President Obama as Jimmy Carter.
Reflecting on the enthusiasm of his supporters in an interview with Bloomberg, Trump said his movement is "greater than anything we've seen in this country," adding that "Reagan had a little bit of this, but I don't think to the same extent." When Reagan was actually in office, Trump spent tens of thousands of dollars on ads criticizing his foreign policy.
As for Obama, Trump says the recent Iran boats incident is "Jimmy Carter stuff" that shows the two presidents' shared weakness. "We are now back in the age of Jimmy Carter," he argued at a rally on Wednesday. "Remember the hostages? We couldn't get them back." The comparison might be more apt had the recent boats saga not been peacefully resolved in less than 24 hours.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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