Exclusive—Cliff Sims: Trump’s Populism Is the True Heir to Reagan’s Blue-Collar Conservatism, not Pence’s Globalism

Last week, former Vice President Mike Pence declared that there was a “fundamental” and “unbridgeable” divide between Reagan and Trump conservatives and that the new populist right could very well end the Republican Party as we know it.

In reality, while Donald Trump’s hard-charging style is a departure from Ronald Reagan’s happy warrior approach, the ideas that underpin Trump’s campaign are building a blue-collar coalition reminiscent of the Reagan era – a development that could actually save the GOP as a national party, rather than destroy it.

Similar to Pence, I am an outspoken evangelical from middle America who came up in politics idolizing Reagan. As chairman of the University of Alabama College Republicans, I used to quote Reagan in nearly every speech, reminding people that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

Years later, while working in the Trump White House, I admired that Pence was unashamed to speak openly about his faith. Even now, I respect his willingness to buck what’s politically fashionable, even though I often disagree with him. But I also believe that Pence’s vision for the GOP is the surest path to Republicans never again vying to win a national election.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams late in life, reflecting on the political divisions of their own era, “every one takes his side in favor of the many, or of the few.”

For far too long, Republicans have been the party of the few. Of entrepreneurs, but not the employees who help bring their ideas to fruition. Of Big Business, but not the workers – often union members – on the assembly lines and shop floors. Of globalization and the idea that lower-cost consumer goods were a worthwhile tradeoff for disappearing livelihoods and vanishing purpose.

The Republican Party’s problems have been both public perception and public policy.

When I first got into politics in the early 2010s, “pro-business” was Republicans’ go-to slogan, even in my home state of Alabama where we only had one Fortune 500 company. And Republicans in Washington were famously cozy with Wall Street and its allied advocacy groups, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

On the policy front, Republican President George W. Bush advocated for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. He did this even during the Hainan Island incident, when the Chinese government detained the crew of an American military plane after a Chinese fighter jet collided with it and forced it to make an emergency landing.

At that moment, Bush called China a “strategic competitor,” language that remains en vogue with Big Business Republicans who want to separate commerce and trade from China’s growing militarism and expansionist ambitions. And all the while, American manufacturing jobs were destroyed by the hundreds of thousands, leaving entire swaths of the country languishing with no hope for economic mobility.

Bush also launched what have become known as the “forever wars,” including the Iraq catastrophe that Pence continues to defend to this day, costing thousands of American lives and wasting trillions of dollars that could have been used, at minimum, to offset the downsides of globalization that disproportionately hurt the working class.

It’s no wonder that so-called “Reagan Democrats” didn’t stick with the Republican Party after The Gipper exited the stage. Not until Trump’s emergence as the blue-collar billionaire did working class Americans hear a Republican presidential candidate fully embrace their plight, champion their aspirations, and pledge to defend their interests.

This included rejecting Reagan’s greatest policy blunder: granting blanket amnesty to nearly three million illegal immigrants toward the end of his time in office. Many Republicans since then have tried and failed to strike a grand immigration bargain, trading amnesty for the promise of border security. Trump reversed that approach, ensuring the bottom rungs of the economic ladder would not be chopped out from under hard-working Americans through suppressed wages. But more than that, it showed he was serious about stopping the flow of fentanyl that has decimated America’s working-class communities.

Trump is a unique force of nature as a political personality and movement leader. But it is the issues he champions that are leading to wholesale political realignment and restoring hope that Republicans can build a long-term governing majority for a new era.

We want limited government because we want power to remain with the People, not simply to shift that power to Big Business and Big Tech oligarchs.

We want commonsense work requirements for welfare recipients, but we do not want to take retirement benefits from hard-working Americans who don’t deserve to live their sunset years in poverty.

We want lower taxes – as the No. 1 hit song recently said, we still feel “taxed to no end” – but we have no patience for corporate loopholes, nor do we feel obligated to placate any individual whose net worth exceeds the GDP of a small European economy.

We want peace and believe building the world’s strongest military gives us the best chance of securing it. But we do not want to send working-class American boys to die in a faraway country. We want them building a life, getting married, and starting families that can thrive on one income, rather than having to send both parents into the workforce just to provide a decent life for their children. And if we have to deploy the military, we’d rather do it to wipe out drug cartels and defend our own border, rather than someone else’s on the other side of the world.

We want freedom of thought and freedom of speech, issues for which we have taken up the mantle abandoned by so-called liberals. And we believe there is no shame in demanding the American government serve the interests of the American people.

Many of these ideas would have fit in well with Reagan’s campaign in 1980. But both the message and the messenger have been reshaped for a new era. After all, Reagan enjoyed a friendship with Democrat Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, his political opposition; Trump’s political adversaries are literally trying to throw him in prison for the rest of his life.

Republicans have the rare opportunity to complete a total reshaping of the electoral map by leaning into being the party of “the many,” while the Democrat Party grasps for “the few.” Today, Democrats are awash in Wall Street cash and in bed with Big Tech. The Chamber of Commerce can’t even get a meeting with the Republican Speaker of the House after fighting to keep Democrats in power. And President Biden seems much more concerned with the war in Ukraine than he is the siege at our own southern border. In short, Democrats are at odds with working Americans on nearly every issue, both cultural and economic.

Trump accelerated a shift that needed to happen anyway. So, when Pence rings his hands that “the Republican Party as we have long known it will cease to exist,” as a Republican, I hope he’s right.

Cliff Sims served as Special Assistant to the President in the Trump White House (2017-2018) and Deputy Director of National Intelligence (2020-2021).