Did Reagan pave the way for Trump? ‘You can trace the linkages,’ says biographer

"Understand this about immigration," Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives and a staunch Democrat, said in an interview on HBO earlier this month. "The best speech on immigration was by President Ronald Reagan."

Pelosi is not alone among Democrats heaping praise on the 40th president for his pro-immigration views, defiance of tyranny and politics of optimism - "It's morning in America." For many he has come to symbolise nostalgia for a more innocent, less partisan time. Visitors to America's capital often land at Ronald Reagan Washington national airport. A newly released biopic starring Dennis Quaid is the latest burnishing of the myth.

But a critically praised biography of Reagan challenges these assumptions, balancing recognition of Reagan's strengths with a close examination of his glaring weaknesses on inequality, race and the Aids pandemic. Its introduction poses a provocative question: "Did Reaganism contain the seeds of Trumpism?"

And the book comes not from a progressive Democrat but a former foreign policy adviser to the Republican presidential campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio. Max Boot is himself an immigrant: he was born in Moscow, grew up in Los Angeles, gained US citizenship and is now a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank.

"I guess my relationship with the Republican party is like the love affair that ended badly," Boot, 55, says in a Zoom interview from his white-walled home in New York. "I was an ardent admirer of Reagan as a young man in the 1980s.

"He made conservatism cool for a lot of people including me growing up in that decade and all the more so in my case because I was born in the Soviet Union and my family came here and so tended to gravitate towards the right side of the political spectrum. I loved it when he called the Soviet Union 'the evil empire' and stood up for human rights behind the iron curtain. He made me a Republican."

But a day after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Boot reregistered as an independent. He believes this has given him an objectivity and distance from his biographical subject. "That's allowed me to write a much better book than I would have written in the past if I were writing from a pro-Reagan or pro-Republican standpoint. What I tried to do was to do a very balanced job that was neither hagiography nor hit job but trying to show Reagan both good and bad."