October 27, 2025 | Matthew Continetti

A voice from the past has shaken President Donald Trump.

When Ontario’s provincial government ran a 60-second ad attacking protectionism during the World Series last week, President Trump was furious. He suspended trade talks with our northern neighbor. He demanded the ad be pulled. And he announced an additional 10 percent tariff on Canadian imports “over and above what they are paying now.”

Why the outrage? Trump accused Canada of trying to influence the U.S. Supreme Court, which hears arguments next week on the constitutionality of his “Liberation Day” tariffs. But I suspect Trump was less bothered by the ad’s content than by its narrator: President Ronald Reagan, delivering his April 25, 1987 radio address.

By having Reagan make the case against tariffs, the ad’s creators suggested that the 40th president wouldn’t agree with the 45th and 47th. They implied that Trump is a heretic in the Reaganite faith. They tried to drive a wedge between Trump and the Reagan-loving GOP base. It’s a reminder that not every Republican is a loyal soldier in the trade war—which is a problem. Trump needs Reagan’s legacy to legitimize his own—even as he overtakes the Gipper as the party’s defining figure.

Trump’s relationship with Reagan is complicated. He was closer, personally and politically, to another Republican president: Richard Nixon. In the early 1980s he started a correspondence with Nixon, who went on to tell him that he had a future in politics. By contrast, Trump met Reagan only once. The two men were photographed shaking hands in the White House’s Blue Room on November 3, 1987, at a reception for the “Friends of Art and Preservation in Embassies Foundation.” A fleeting moment. Reagan mentions neither the event nor Trump in his diary.

Trump was thinking of entering politics at the time. Not long before, he’d placed a full-page ad in The New York Times denouncing the political establishment. Its themes sound familiar. “There’s nothing wrong with America’s foreign defense policy that a little backbone can’t cure,” Trump wrote. Our allies were freeloaders. “The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.” Solution? “Tax” the nations we defend.

Trump didn’t mention names. But his indictment no doubt included the commander in chief.

When Trump did enter politics, he brought those views with him. Some elements of his presidency—tax cuts, deregulation, originalist judges, American patriotism—echo Reagan’s. Others—wholehearted embrace of tariffs, downgrading human rights and democracy promotion, a hard line on border enforcement and immigration—do not. Nor does Trump’s demeanor resemble Reagan’s. Trump is an agent of retribution, an insult comic. Reagan was all sunshine and good humor.

Yet the two men share certain traits. They both were television stars before entering politics. They both survived assassination attempts. They both were elected to second terms. They both enjoyed tremendous support from the religious right, despite not being regular church attendees. And they both are reviled by the left intelligentsia.

Trump has played up these connections. In his first term, a portrait of President Andrew Jackson hung near the Resolute desk. It has since been replaced—by a portrait of Reagan. And Trump seems to go out of his way to be photographed with Reagan in the background.

For someone as attuned to images as Trump, this can’t be entirely accidental. He must like the association with Reagan—one successful two-term Republican president looking over the shoulder of another. The painting also establishes Reagan as a figure from the past, someone who belongs to history. It’s Trump who’s alive, active, consequential.

Ontario’s advertisement illustrated the differences. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute was right to say that the Canadian ad uses selective quotation to misrepresent Reagan’s speech. In fact, on that morning in the spring of 1987, President Reagan warned of trade wars while announcing duties on Japanese semiconductors. “We expect our trading partners to live up to their agreements,” he stated. “As I’ve often said: Our commitment to free trade is also a commitment to fair trade.”

Ontario left out that part.

But Trump was selective as well. He exaggerates when he writes that Reagan “LOVED TARIFFS FOR OUR COUNTRY, AND ITS NATIONAL SECURITY” and “LOVED Tariffs for purposes of National Security and the Economy.”

Not quite.

Reagan never self-identified as “Tariff Man,” as Trump has. He never proclaimed that “trade wars are good, and easy to win,” as Trump did.

The import quotas and export controls that Reagan imposed throughout the 1980s were done reluctantly and with regret. His economic nationalism was retaliatory. He meant to bring trading partners to the negotiating table. He meant to ward off Democratic protectionists in Congress.

Free trade was central to Reagan’s philosophy. In the 1960s, historian Lee Edwards visited the Reagans’ home. He found in the library well-annotated copies of free market classics penned by Frédéric Bastiat, Henry Hazlitt, Friedrich Hayek, and Richard Cobden and John Bright, the famed 19th-century British opponents of the protectionist Corn Laws.

Years later, when syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert D. Novak interviewed Reagan in the White House for a book on the 1980 election, they asked him to name his favorite philosopher. Cobden and Bright were high on the list. Evans and Novak were surprised. They hadn’t expected a conservative U.S. president to cite a pair of obscure Victorian liberals.

Reagan’s vision was expansive. He wanted to open markets, not constrict them. He announced his campaign for the GOP nomination in 1979 by proposing a North American accord that would bring the United States, Canada, and Mexico closer together politically and economically. “In fact,” he said, “the key to our own future security may lie in both Mexico and Canada becoming much stronger countries than they are today.”

As president, Reagan oversaw the Caribbean Basin Initiative, reducing trade barriers throughout Central America and the Caribbean. He presided over a free trade agreement with Israel. He launched a round of negotiations over the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the precursor to the World Trade Organization, which his press secretary called “a defeat for protectionism throughout the world.” He signed the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement—the basis for NAFTA.

Even as Reagan stressed the benefits of commerce, he also cautioned against unfair trade practices. And he retaliated against them. “Free trade is in all our interests, but because of foreign subsidies and protections, our farmers are being pitted against the economic strength of the national treasuries of other countries,” he told an agricultural group in 1982. “All nations, particularly our friends in Europe and Japan, must be made to understand that trade is a two-way proposition.”

To Reagan, tariffs were a prudential or political deviation from principle. To Trump, tariffs are an end in themselves. Trump seeks not to integrate markets for the global benefit, but to strengthen the American market for our national interest. It’s a revolution in international trade. And it might not end well.

Which is why Reagan’s voice in the ad struck a nerve. Even during the Trump era, Reagan remained the Republican ideal. In 2023, the Pew Research Center found that 41 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning adults said Reagan had done the best job as president over the past 40 years. Trump was close behind, at 37 percent.

By January 2025, however, Gallup had found that 86 percent of Republicans gave Trump an “outstanding” or “above average” ranking, followed by Reagan at 82 percent. Over the summer, CNN’s Henry Enten used polling data to argue that Trump’s popularity among Republicans surpasses Reagan’s.

Yet to put his imprint on the party and on history, Trump must fold Reagan’s presidency into his own, even if that means distorting Reagan’s views on trade.

The fight with Canada, then, isn’t just over tariffs. It’s over the character of the GOP, and whether Trump, at last, will eclipse Reagan as conservative hero and Republican icon.