Trump flunked the Reagan test and now America knows 'he's nuts': ex-GOP insider

Heading into a pivotal presidential debate with President Jimmy Carter in 1980, then-candidate Ronald Reagan worked to address his biggest vulnerability: Namely, that he could come off as too extreme for American voters.

As former Republican insider David Frum writes on X, Reagan went out of his way to project calm and evenhandedness in his debate with Carter in order to dispel notions that he was the same right-wing ideologue who years earlier had railed against the dangers of Medicare.

Frum contends that this is a far different tack than the one former President Donald Trump took into his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, and he points to Reagan's famous question to Americans about whether they were better off in 1980 than they had been when Carter was first elected in 1976 as a prime example.

"Notice the simplicity and dignity of the language," argues Frum. "Notice the temperateness of the mood. Notice that he 'suggests' -- not demands -- the viewer's vote. Notice the respect for the voter's ultimate right of decision."

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Throughout his remarks at the close of the debate, Reagan simply asks Americans to consider whether it's easier for them to buy things at stores and whether it's easier to find a job than it was four years prior.

This is in contrast to Trump, who simply tells Americans that the country is a "failing nation" that is on the brink of both a second Great Depression and World War III.

It's this temperamental difference, suggests Frum, that should make all the difference to voters in 2024.

"The contrast with the present-day could not be more stark," he writes. "The Trump-Harris debate showed Trump as a man who has escaped whatever little self-control he ever had, a yelling-ranting-insult machine. Whatever you most fear, he might do it. 'In your guts, you know he's nuts.'"