Trump and Reagan

Quite a few people have noted that Donald Trump seems to have derived his "facts" about border problems from a movie called Sicario. What far too few have pointed out is that Trump has simply adapted one of Ronald Reagan's signature moves.

Few now recall that one of the most appalling aspects of the Reagan presidency was his propensity for lying. His fabrications were almost as outrageous as Der Donald's, though Reagan could not match Trump for the frequency of his falsehoods.

We have, for instance, contemporaneous reports that Reagan apparently was a pathological liar. He bragged of liberating concentration camps in Germany although he spent all of World War II in Hollywood. He invented “a verbal message” from the pope in support of his Central America policies and lied about that too. He insisted, in 1985, that the leader of South Africa’s vicious apartheid regime, P.W. Botha, had “eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country.” Pants on fire...

Actually, the concentration camp story had a much more complex origin; see this 1997 exchange between Joan Didion and Charles Hill (who worked for the Reagan administration). Didion quotes a book by Michael Deaver, who may be considered Reagan's Michael Cohen (although Deaver was nicer). The passage is worthy of note here...

In the mid-1980s, a growing number of people seemed willing to believe that for Reagan reality and myth often blur. It has been suggested that he would borrow from his movie roles to give texture to his wartime duties. He was, and is, fond of telling stories about heroic pilots, or POWs who staged daring escapes.

Reagan may have heard the stories firsthand, from the veterans who brought them back. He may have had burned into his mind a scene from the combat footage his unit would sometimes edit. Or, yes, the real acts of courage or horror may have blended with moments from his old films.

Another issue seemed to bother some of his critics: that Reagan wanted people to believe he had seen these deeds, or had somehow brushed the actual events...

But Reagan is a romantic, not an imposter. When he talked about seeing the bodies of the Holocaust victims piled like firewood, he may or may not have explained that he had been viewing the footage shipped home by the Signal Corps. (He saw this nightmare on film, not in person. That did not mean he saw it less.)

I would argue that, yes, it does. I've seen the first-generation Holocaust films compiled by Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and Alain Resnais. But seeing those documentaries is not the same thing as being there at that time.

The key words in the Deaver passage are these: "Reagan is a romantic, not an imposter." Throughout the 1980s, many people spoke as though Reagan's Hollywood background gave him carte blanche to concoct melodramatic yarns. Well, I worked in Hollywood myself, albeit in a very low-level fashion. Does my unsuccessful jaunt through the outskirts of the industry give me the right to fabricate tales?

The Reagan story that most resembles Trump's Sicario delusion is recounted here:

Two years later, Reagan found himself in hot water after New York Daily News scribe Lars-Erik Nelson looked into an account of heroism Reagan related during a Congressional Medal of Honor ceremony and discovered that there was no evidence the event ever occurred.

In the story, which J. David Woodard describes in his book "The America that Reagan Built," a B-17 bomber came under fire in the course of a European bombing raid in World War II. With the plane rapidly losing altitude, the B-17 commander ordered his soldiers to evacuate the bomber. When all but one young soldier had left the bomber, the commander gripped the remaining soldier's hand and said, "Never mind, son, we'll ride it down together."

Nelson examined all 434 Medal of Honor cases and could not find any citation of the event Reagan described. But one reader told Nelson that the story bore similarities to a scene from the World War II-era film "A Wing and a Prayer," while another claimed to have read it in the Reader's Digest. White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes had his own response.

“If you tell the same story five times, it’s true," he said.

No. It isn't.

A Wing and a Prayer was a Henry Hathaway drama produced in 1944. I've never seen it, although I know that it was popular when released and is still well-regarded by fans of classic films. (According to the IMSB, it heavily fictionalizes real events.) Reagan's use of the story was absurd on its face: How would anyone know that the doomed commander said those words?

When Reagan's lie was exposed, the major media -- which, throughout the 1980s, always took a very forgiving attitude toward the president -- excused this outrageous exercise in bullshittery. A commonly-heard reference went to the final line of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence: "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Nobody quotes that line if any Democrat dissembles.

Nobody will ever say "He's a romantic" if a Dem stretches the truth beyond the boundaries of its elasticity.

This double standard has been in place for nearly forty years, and it remains infuriating. Infuriating.

I'm left with the same question I often ask about shameless bullshitters: Do they really believe their own BS? Consider such notorious tale-tellers as L. Ron Hubbard and Joseph Smith: Both men fabricated huge chunks of their biographies, yet on some level, they actually seemed at least semi-convinced by their own fables.

Can the same be said of Reagan? Of Trump?