Mark Levin: 'I’m a Reagan Guy, but I’m Also a Trump Guy'
Conservative commentator Mark Levin said the United States is “extremely fortunate” to have Donald Trump as president, comparing him favorably to former President Ronald Reagan, whom the radio talk show host worked for in the 1980s.
“I often tell my wife, ‘We’re going to miss Trump when he’s gone,’ and I’m a Reagan guy, but I’m also a Trump guy,” Levin said earlier this month at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.
His statement drew resounding applause from the audience on-hand for the talk.
“I would tell you this, in the Republican primary, I supported [Sen. Ted] Cruz, and then come the general election, I supported the president, Trump, and I’m glad I did, because a lot of his positions are so solid,” Levin recalled.
“I don’t know that any of those other Republicans on the stage, as I think back, could have withstood what he is withstanding right now.”
Levin, who was chief of staff to Reagan administration Attorney General Edwin Meese, argued that Trump stands between conservatives and the left-wing agenda being pushed by Democrats and the establishment media.
“And I think we are extremely fortunate that he’s there,” Levin said.
“[Trump’s] a fighter. He takes on the media. He takes on the Democrat Party. He takes on individuals in his own party. He calls them as he sees them. And this is what drives them nuts,” the New York Times best-selling author of the new book “Unfreedom of The Press” said.
Levin conceded that Trump could say things differently, perhaps more diplomatically at times, but that “he doesn’t want to.”
“Maybe if they stopped calling him Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini and a white supremacist and an anti-Semite and a racist, maybe he won’t call them ‘nasty,’ or a ‘kook,’ or whatever,” the Fox News host said.
Levin shared with his audience that he has met Trump on a few occasions and found him to be a “very smart” and “enormously charismatic man.”
“He knows what’s going on, knows where he wants to take the country. He’s not anything like he’s portrayed in the media,” Levin said. “He’s very deep. When you look at him compared to [former vice president and 2020 Democrat presidential contender Joe] Biden, it’s like a joke.”
“I also know he loves his country,” Levin added. “I also know he believes in our economic system. I also know he believes in sovereignty, borders for a country. I also know how he treats allies, like Israel.”
“He knows infanticide when he hears it and he rejects it. He’s put more originalists on the courts since Ronald Reagan.”
The commentator noted that unlike former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — who currently serves as a Republican senator from Utah — and the late GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Trump was able to win a presidential election.
Gary Bauer, Reagan’s chief domestic policy adviser, believes Trump is the right man for the current political environment.
“I think some of the people today you hear say, ‘Oh I wish we had Ronald Reagan again instead of Donald Trump’ are in denial about the nature of the time we live in,” Bauer, president of the conservative group American Values, told The Western Journal in a recent interview.
“Ronald Reagan was exactly the right kind of conservative candidate in the 1980s.”
“Ronald Reagan, in my view, would not be able to win in America today, because his demeanor was so kind and gentle. But we’re living in an era when the left is willing to destroy people that stand up against them in ways that in the ’80s, those of us in the Reagan administration couldn’t begin to imagine,” Bauer added.
“And it takes somebody like a President Trump to be able to fight back and prevail against that kind of pressure.”
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