The Washington Post reported that the Ronald Reagan Foundation asked the Trump campaign to stop using the former president’s name for the Trump campaign.
Reagan Foundation to Trump, RNC: Quit Raising Money Off Ronald Reagan’s Legacy.
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, which runs the 40th president’s library near Los Angeles, has demanded that President Trump and the Republican National Committee (RNC) quit raising campaign money by using Ronald Reagan’s name and likeness.
“It was simply handled with a phone call mid-last week to the RNC, and they agreed to stop,” Reagan Foundation chief marketing officer Melissa Giller said in an email Saturday.
What came to the foundation’s attention — and compelled officials there to complain — was a fundraising email that went out July 19 with “Donald J. Trump” identified as the sender and a subject line that read: “Ronald Reagan and Yours Truly.”
The solicitation offered, for a donation of $45 or more, a “limited edition” commemorative set featuring two gold-colored coins, one with an image of Reagan and one with an image of Trump. The coins were mounted with a 1987 photograph of Reagan and Trump shaking hands in a White House receiving line — the type of fleeting contact that presidents have with thousands of people a year…In the 1990s, both Reagan and his wife Nancy signed legal documents that granted the foundation sole rights to their names, likenesses and images. Of course, there are countless photos and videos of Reagan that are in the public domain. But the foundation claims power to block them from being used for commercial purposes and political endorsements.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Michael Ahrens, the RNC’s communications director, told The Hill that the foundation had “just recently hosted the Trump family to raise money for its organization and has not objected to us using President Reagan’s likeness before.” But he said the RNC will stop “emailing this fundraising solicitation as a courtesy.”…… this per The Hill. Seems the Reagan Foundation now wants to separate itself from current state of Republicanism? There is NO Republican Party anymore….just a bunch of sycophants propping up a rising fascist.
If I may be so pretentious and bold to correct your last sentence 🤓: There is a Republican Party; it’s a bunch of sycophants propping up and enabling a fascist.
Yes. Exactly, Greg.
I don’t think we are there…. yet. If Trump wins in Nov it is certain that fascism will become the norm. I think he is pushing for something that most Americans will never accept.
Whether we are a fascist state is debatable, less so with each passing day. That the Idiot is a fascist–not maybe, not in the making–is not in any way debatable. He was in 2015, he still is today, and will be so tomorrow.
Trump and the current GOP make Reagan look like a wild hippy on pot riding a bucking bronco. Reagan would be rejected by the McConnell crowd for being too “liberal” . . . Nancy Reagan would be the new Germaine Greer to the GOP today. Reagan would never have French kissed modern day despots and tyrants the way Trump has.
You’re right, Robert. And Reagan did have a genuine folksy charm. I hated everything he stood for but had to admit that. I knew that the Hippie movement was over when folks my age grew up and voted for the guy, which I thought altogether wacko.
After the Repugnicans, in the second most appalling example of electoral dirty tricks ever (after, of course, the social media disinformation campaign on behalf of Trump by Russian foreign intelligence), engineered a debacle for Carter over the Iran hostages by making a secret deal for them to hold the hostages until immediately after the election (How traitorous is that!!!!!!???????), Ronnie won in a landslide. The electorate simply wouldn’t forgive Carter for the failed hostage rescue mission. The people who undertook that traitorous deal with Iran were never brought to justice, and the press just let it slide.
Utter lack of integrity is nothing new for the Repugnicans. They’ve been at that for some time now.
If I may also be pretentious & call them psychophants.
Psychophant: the new symbol of the G.O.P.
(We have to stop allowing them to use elephants as the GOP symbol. They’re lovely animals.)
So, it is ok for the Regan Foundation to use Trump’s family to raise money for itself, but not ok for Trump to use Reagan’s image for Trump’s campaign. I think the Trump campaign will figure our a different way to market Trump as if he is continuing the legacy of Reagan.
As if? But he is continuing the legacy of Reagan. Remember that Reagan rode into office on the backs of “welfare queens” (i.e., poor black women). He allowed thousands of gay men to die of AIDS without ever mentioning the word. He architected the Iran-Contra scandal lies that created right-wing death squads in Nicaragua. He was chock-full of hubris and militarism. Granted, Reagan was more “statesmanlike” about it, but Trump is just the logical next chapter in what Reagan started (or, actually, what Reagan himself was only continuing).
Reagan, grrrrr, the ghoul who went around the country in the early 1960s campaigning AGAINST Medicare and Medicaid because they would supposedly lead to a loss of freedom and socialism. That guy.
Yes. Reaganomics set us on the course to the vast inequalities of wealth and income that we see today and propped up the systemic racism, with its economic roots (among many of this toxic plant) being challenged by the BLM movement today.
And Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers in one fell swoop. He was banal evil with a warmth in his voice and a Darwinism in his governance. Polished, charming, smooth, welcoming, polite and a great listener, embracing of all, and utterly diabolical. Great style and immoral substance. One of the worst.
Reagan also started us on the road to neoliberalism. “Government IS the problem.” Let’s not forget his union busting. He fired all the air traffic controllers.
You Betcha!!!! and poor Bush1 had to spend his term mopping up the Reagan mess which made him look incompetent and led us to….Hillary/Bill Clinton. OH MY!
What a RIOT … hahahaha.
tRump has no shame whatsoever. He uses people, even THE DEAD.
.
Well, well, well. Isn’t this poetic?
LOL!!!!
Any way you slice it, that’s some bad poetry!
I always cringe when the Repugnicans bring up Saint Reagan. A few facts about the man:
He was a hardcore racist. He used the “n” word in private conversation, made up and told incessantly a story about a Cadillac-driving “welfare queen,” and announced his first successful campaign in a speech about states’ rights (which was all about voting rights and desegregation in those days) in the county where Ku Klux Klan criminals firebombed a black church, killing three little black girls. Quite the dog whistle, that.
He was dumb as dirt. He consulted an astrologer about matters of state. He believed that trees were the major source of air pollution. He totally bought and peddled the snake oil of trickle-down economics. He massively ramped up Nixon’s stupid, disastrous, failed “War on Drugs.” Have a look at Mexico and Columbia during and after his term in office for a lesson on how well that worked out.
In his second term, he suffered from dementia. He would lose track of what he was saying mid-sentence and finish the sentence with something grammatically unrelated to what he had started to say. At the beginning of his second term, according to Howard Baker, who served as one of Reagan’s Chiefs of Staff, before the first cabinet meeting, another cabinet member pulled Baker aside and said to him, “Don’t be surprised if the old man isn’t all there.”
Of course, Reagan lied, lied, lied about the Iran/Contra affair, in which he sold arms to U.S. enemies in order to finance a secret illegal war, the ugly consequences of which we are still reaping, and the bigwigs in his party and the pundits who supported him and them, all went along with the lie, enabling him, though EVERYONE KNEW THE TRUTH about this.
In short, he had some Trumpy qualities–the racism, the simple-mindedness, the ignorance, the lying, the dependence on showmanship rather than substance. However, there are also major differences. He did not, literally, have MALIGNANT NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER, as Trump does. He was not completely amoral but, rather, simple-minded and confused, and he could feel and convey genuine compassion and sometimes act with kindness and grace (unless, of course, you were gay, in which case he would just let you die). And, importantly, unlike Trump, Reagan was capable of learning.
Kurt Vonnegut, in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, wanted to show that Billy Pilgrim’s wife was a total wack job, so he put a “Ronald Reagan for President” bumper sticker on her car. Everyone got the joke. At the time (the novel was published in 1969), Reagan was giving speeches about how Social Security was a Communist plot. (His handlers had to cure him of that; otherwise, he would never have been elected president.) And Reagan was, of course, one of the McCarthy Era Red Scare extremists–a Hoover-level Red-Baiting Cold Warrior who saw everything in black-and-white terms–America the Good v. The Evil Empire. But when he got into office and listen to the experts explain to him that a nuclear war was NOT WINNABLE, that EVERYONE WOULD LOSE, BIG TIME, he reversed course and hammered out the historic INF Treaty. In other words, unlike Trump (“Nobody knows x like Trump,” where x = everything), Reagan would actually talk to experts and listen to what they had to say. He figured that nuclear engineers knew more about nuclear weapons than he did and that career intelligence officers knew more about intelligence.
So, unlike Trump, he was capable, sometimes, of learning, and his personality wasn’t always just one of automatic, kneejerk nastiness.
cx: I meant, of course, “his first successful Presidential campaign” above
Reagan actually believed in and cared about the values he espoused. He lived in a world that was very, very simple, in his mind. Trump believes in nothing and cares about nothing except Trump. And if Reagan’s internal model of the world was simple–good guys and bad guys, right out of a John Wayne western–Trump’s is a sick comic book parody–a comic book drawn in orange crayon by a predator.
Bob, not with an orange crayon. With a sharpie. He can even redirect hurricanes with that sharpie.
Oh, yes. The magic Sharpie! Like Howard and the Purple Crayon, but creepy.
Well…there you go again… 🤪
Nice, Bob, and thank you.
Bob has pretty much nailed it. Reagan was all those things and also the man who moved toward conciliation with Gorbachev faster than his seasoned advisers would have had. There is a long history of political leaders doing the right thing when their people were against it. But not since 2000.
Reagan was not conciliatory towards Gorbachev until after the USSR collapsed.
He was nothing like Trump seeking Kim’s friendship and sucking up to Putin
Yikes! cx: Colombia, of course.
Reagan’s Legacy
What Reagan started
Trump completes
What Reagan farted
Trump just eats
With Reagan, one could detest his policies and political, social, and economic views but still genuinely like the man. With Trump this is impossible. Why that is is an interesting question. Also, Reagan had the incredibly brilliant Peggy Noonan.
I wish I hadn’t used the word “incredibly,” there–wrong connotations. Just plain brilliant would have been fine. LOL.
Come to think of it, I would give almost anything to hear Diane Ravitch and Peggy Noonan sit down and discuss, for a couple hours, BLM, the Trump maladministration, the election, the pandemic, where the world is headed, political philosophy, life, the universe, and everything.
Peggy Noonan on Trump:
“[U]pset that people might be getting the impression he was a physical coward, he set out to prove he is brave. Protected by a phalanx of police, Secret Service, sharpshooters and what looked like a Praetorian Guard with shields, he marched to St John’s, the church of the presidents. Aides said it was a Churchill moment. And it was just like Churchill during the blitz, if Churchill secretly loved rubble. Upon arrival with his friends, the people who work for him, he brandished a Bible like—who in history?—the devil?
“In all this he gave up the game and explicitly patronized his own followers. It was as if he was saying: I’m going to show you how stupid I know you are. I’ll give you crude and gross imagery and you’ll love it because you’re crude and gross people.
“And some would love it. But not all. Not most, I think.
He has maxed out his base. He’s got his 40% and will keep it, but it isn’t growing. His polls are down, he has historically high negatives. As for suburban women, they’d crawl over broken husbands to vote him out.”
I met Reagan once. It was a meeting with about 25 educators sitting around the big oval table in the Cabinet Room, discussing education of course. He was affable, easy-going, charming, almost self-effacing. He opened the meeting by telling a joke or two. One was about when he was Governor of California. He said he was meeting with angry college students, and one of them said, “Your generation is far behind the times. We grew up with space shuttles, computers, all sorts of technology that your generation couldn’t imagine.” He said he told the young man, “Son, my generation invented all those things.” He listened attentively to the conversation. He never boasted about himself. I know he did many awful things, but he was very likable.
So love this post, Diane!
One of the problems Trump has had is that he couldn’t start a foreign war to rally idiots behind him. I think he toyed with the idea, but of course his keepers in Moscow wouldn’t let him do that. So he decided he would start one at home. How’s that going for you, Donnie?
And meanwhile, Biden, who played high-school football and baseball, as well as college football, is “biden” his time, running out the clock on his opponent. Trump’s cheer-leading squad is looking ridiculous, the bleachers on his side are increasingly empty, and he’s got no game.
There, for the first time in my life, I used a sports metaphor. This, for crying out loud, I’ve been driven to.
So, Diane, is it true that you will be speaking at the AFT convention? Exciting!!!
I am on a panel and I’m receiving an award. I was supposed to go to Houston for the convention but it is virtual. I am posting the schedule at 8:30 tomorrow morning.
Awesome.
Hoping that the AFT takes a national stance against opening schools, meaning action, not just words.
Teachers work (& pay!) for the national union. Now it’s time for the AFT & the NEA to get to work for them.
This is a matter of life & death.
Just in
“Nixon Foundation asks Trump to stop using Nixon’s name”
Haha! I doubt he will use Bush name as 45 trashes all the Bush family.