President Donald Trump told his former campaign manager in an interview for a new book that his accomplishments in office have exceeded Ronald Reagan’s, and the world would know it if reporters were more honest.
‘I blow Ronald Reagan away,’ he says in ‘Trump’s Enemies: How the Deep State Is Undermining the Presidency,’ a nonfiction title from Corey Lewandowski and former campaign adviser David Bossie.
Reagan’s signature achievement was causing the collapse of the Soviet Union by forcing it to hemorrhage money keeping up with America’s defense spending.
He was also an economic hero to conservatives, deploying tax cuts and spending restraint to create 16 million jobs and lower the so-called misery index – the inflation and unemployment rates combined – from 20 per cent to 97 per cent.
Trump says his results make him ‘far greater than Ronald Reagan,’ but ‘fake news’ outlets and even some conservative commentators religiously line up against him.
President Donald Trump said in an intervierw for a new book that his policy results so far make him ‘far better’ than Romald Reagan
Reagan was president from 1981 to 1989; he’s best known for escalating an arms race that bankrupted the Soviet Union, eliminating America’s commnunist mortal enemy; The Reagans are pictured here on the night of the 1980 presidential election
Authors Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager, and Dave Bossie, deputy campaign manager and part of the transition team, interviewed the president for ‘ Trump’s Enemies: How the Deep State Is Undermining the Presidency,’ published Tuesday
‘If they looked at my agenda with a different name … and he got the biggest regulation cuts in history in less than two years, judges, environmental stuff, getting out of the Paris horror show. If you said that conservative president John Smith did that, they would say he’s the greatest president. Far greater than Ronald Reagan,’ the president says in the book.
‘Trump’s Enemies’ lays bare the lengths those who revile the president have gone to undermine and destroy him
‘If my name weren’t Trump, if it were John Smith, they would say I’m the greatest president in history and I blow Ronald Reagan away,’ he added.
Trump has tried from his earliest days of exploring a White House run to align himself with the Reagan legacy.
More than a month before he announced his candidacy in the summer of 2015, he showed up at an Iowa political event with a box full of postcards bearing photos of his younger self meeting the Gipper at the White House.
‘Americans are hungry to feel once again a sense of mission and greatness,’ they read – a line from a 1974 newspaper interview that Reagan would later recycle in a 1975 speech.
At the time, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Reagan was urged to start a new political party to supplant the old Republicans.
President Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan shook Trump’s hand in 1983 during a reception in the State Dining Room
Two years later in 1985 Trump and his then-wife Ivana were ecleomd back to the Reagan White House for a State Dinner celebrating a visit by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia
Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski spoke as President Trump looked on during a rally in Michigan on April 28, 2018
Instead he insisted he would revitalize the GOP by ‘raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people.
Reagan turned ‘Let’s make America great again’ into a slogan so memorable that Trump consciously adopted it 36 years later
Trump also copied his iconic slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ too from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign.
The 40th president popularized the line in 1979, plastering ‘Let’s Make America Great Again’ on posters and buttons.
Trump applied for a trademark of his shorter version in 2012, less than two weeks after Barack Obama beat Republican Mitt Romney in a lackluster re-election campaign.
A former Reagan campaign aide told DailyMail.com in 2016 that Trump served on Reagan’s campaign finance committee in 1979 ‘when most of the New York financial elite were for George Bush or John Connally.’
Trump and his father Fred were in the room when Reagan formally announced his candidacy in New York City, the political veteran said then, adding that Trump personally made it possible for Reagan’s team to get him on the New York ballot.
Trump ‘let us use his helicopter to fly our delegate petitions to Albany, where we filed 15 minutes before closing at the board of elections.’