Reagan Wasn’t the Conservative We All Think: Adrian Wooldridge

For those of us of a certain age and sensibility, Ronald Reagan is the quintessential American conservative. He not only vanquished the Evil Empire and restored business’s animal spirits. He rode a horse, wore a cowboy hat and, when his wife came to visit him in hospital after he survived a 1981 assassination attempt, quipped “honey, I forgot to duck.” By comparison, Donald Trump is an interloper as well as a Yahoo.

But does this view survive forensic analysis? In a recent column on Sam Tanenhaus’ new biography of William Buckley, my colleague, Toby Harshaw, makes it clear that ...