One of President Donald Trump’s superpowers as a politician is getting entities and people who might disagree with what he’s doing to set aside their principles and priors just enough to allow him to plow forward. It happens all the time with Republicans in Congress, who have willingly relegated themselves to second-class citizens in Washington.
They don’t necessarily endorse what he’s doing, mind you. But they do acquiesce. And sometimes they even do Trump a solid by steering the focus towards a common enemy. Think: Trump’s legally dubious deportation policies, the draconian and rushed DOGE cuts, his pardons of violent January 6 defendants, and his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
But rarely have we seen this dynamic play out like late this week – when the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute effectively distanced itself from Ronald Reagan’s own words.
Shortly before 9 p.m. ET on Thursday, the Reagan foundation issued a somewhat bizarre statement.
The government of Ontario, Canada, had recently launched an extensive ad campaign against Trump’s tariffs. The campaign includes a minutelong ad featuring only Reagan’s voice being run during World Series games. It clipped a number of comments from an April 1987 address Reagan gave decrying the dangers of tariffs and trade wars.
The Reagan foundation’s statement accused Ontario of using “selective audio and video” of Reagan and said it “misrepresents” the former president’s address.
As remarkable, the foundation said it was “reviewing its legal options” because Ontario didn’t seek or obtain permission to use Reagan’s remarks.
Neither of these objections really hold water.
While the ad stitched together a number of comments from Reagan’s address, it accurately reflected what he said. The sentiments were also very similar to Reagan’s other comments on tariffs and free trade in this time period. He sometimes used tariffs, but he generally pitched them as a necessary evil and cautioned strongly against trade wars and protectionism.
Reagan’s sentiments on this topic are a world away from the commentary of Trump, who has pitched tariffs as “beautiful,” trade wars as being “good” and “easy to win,” and such policies as being vital to revitalizing American manufacturing.
The foundation has not responded to a question about what, specifically, it alleges was misrepresented in the ad.
As for the suggestion that there could be some legal claim here? It’s not at all clear what that’s based on, either.
Government footage of presidents is generally public domain. The Ontario ad cites the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library as its source. The library uploaded the clip of Reagan’s April 1987 address to YouTube eight years ago and listed its access and use as “unrestricted.”
The foundation likewise didn’t respond to a request for insight into its legal considerations.
In other words, the practical impact of the statement seems to be mostly seeding unspecified doubt – doubt about Reagan’s words and the actions of Ontario – rather than providing any real clarity or view of Trump’s tariffs.
The foundation later re-posted Trump White House adviser Dan Scavino’s post calling Ontario’s ad campaign an “anti-tariff PROPAGANDA ad.”
These sentiments are especially remarkable coming from the foundation given, as of just a couple years ago, it and the Trump team seemed to be at cross-purposes. It’s clear the foundation was doing Trump a real favor.
Perhaps no piece of evidence crystallizes how Trump’s trade wars fly in the face of modern conservative orthodoxy like Reagan’s past comments. Here was the conservative presidential icon of the modern era saying repeatedly, on tape, things diametrically opposed to Trump’s tariff views.
In fact, even Trump and the White House have previously acknowledged Reagan had a very different view on this subject.
In a statement to the Washington Post earlier this year, a White House spokeswoman listed tariffs alongside opposing “amnesty” policies and foreign policy noninterventionism as key differences in the two presidents’ agendas.
Trump a year ago claimed he was actually “in a way more conservative than Reagan” because of his tariffs policies.
But what the Reagan foundation’s posts seemed to suggest was just maybe this Reagan guy wasn’t the free-trader he appeared to be.
Trump was happy to take it from there, going much further in calling the ad “fake” and claiming on social media that Reagan “actually … LOVED TARIFFS FOR OUR COUNTRY.”
“Thank you to the Ronald Reagan Foundation for exposing this FRAUD,” Trump said, while announcing he was cutting off trade talks with Canada over the ads.
Soon, plenty of Trump allies were scouring Reagan’s presidency for pieces of evidence to try and legitimize the claim that Reagan somehow, in fact, loved the tariffs that he spent years deriding.
The Reagan foundation gave Trump ammunition to try and muddy the waters in entirely predictable ways.
But that comes at a cost. To the extent Trump is able to rewrite this portion of history to fuel his trade wars, it comes at the expense of the ideals Reagan spent years advocating. It provides a completely inaccurate picture of the man the foundation is supposed to celebrate.
And in that way, it’s a truly fitting moment in those trade wars.
So many congressional Republicans have set aside years of free-trade evangelism to allow Trump to press forward – this despite the Constitution giving them explicit authority over tariffs.
They, like the Reagan foundation did, often stop well shy of endorsing what Trump is doing. But they’ve effectively greenlit the whole thing by narrowing their commentary and actions in the name of being team players and avoiding Trump’s wrath. They’ve largely held their tongues even after the predictable economic pains caused by the tariffs have jeopardized the economy and the GOP’s hopes of holding congressional majorities in 2026.
Perhaps they hope it will all just subside one day. Maybe they think the Supreme Court might save them by invalidating the tariffs – and they won’t have had to get their own hands dirty.
But if there’s a moment that suggests the issue has gotten away from them, it might be when Trump is able to paint Reagan as a Trumpian protectionist – with an assist from Reagan’s own foundation.