I just saw the movie Reagan featuring Dennis Quaid as the 40th president of the United States.  The movie’s trailer states it’s a biographical “drama based on the life of Ronald Reagan, from his childhood to his time in the oval office.”  It is a one-sided and overly sympathetic view of Ronald Reagan that is not going to win any cinematic awards. The first segment of the movie traces his early years. It starts with him growing up in Dixon, Illinois where his spiritual formation is heavily influenced by his mother, Nelle, including his baptism at the age of 11.  It then moves to his time as lifeguard and radio announcer; his years as a grade-B actor in Hollywood, including his service as the six-time president of the Screen Actors Guild, and his years serving as a corporate spokesperson for G.E. The next segment reviews his tenure as Governor of California, his unsuccessful attempt to defeat incumbent president Gerald Ford in the 1976 Republican presidential primaries, his narrow win over Jimmy Carter in 1980 and his landslide re-election win over Walter Mondale in 1984. The bulk of the movie is devoted to Reagan’s presidential years, including his comeback from an assassination attempt on his life in 1981 by James Hinkley Jr.  His anti-Communism is a major theme throughout this part of the movie, told through a series of imagined conversations between Viktor Petrovich and Andrei Novikov, both former KGB agents. The movie’s script was based on the Paul Kengor book “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.” Reagan is depicted as a fierce anti-Communist who truly views the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” bent on the hostile takeover of the free world.  The movie culminates with him forcefully challenging Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, in a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gates on June 12, 1987, to “tear down the wall” which had divided East and West Berlin since 1961. The film concludes with Reagan’s announcement that he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and in the final scene of the movie, him riding off into the sunset on his horse. The movie glosses over many of Reagan’s policy disasters, including his failure to address the AIDS epidemic, which is hardly mentioned in the movie, and the 1983 truck bombing at the Beirut Airport that killed 220 U.S. Marines which was not mentioned at all.  Also excluded was his early opposition to the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and Medicare, which he called an attempt to impose socialism which he wanted to make voluntary. For me as a progressive, the most glaring omission was the failure to acknowledge that Reagan essentially ran during the later stages of his career against the New Deal, which he called “fascism”, and the Great Society, which he termed the “welfare state”.  It was Reagan, during the 1976 campaign against Jerry Ford who first popularized the term “welfare queen”, when he told audiences “There’s a woman in Chicago.  She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexisting [sic] deceased husbands …And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards.  She got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.” According to Andy Borowitz in his book Profiles in Ignorance, Reagan later upgraded the number of her alias from 80 to 127 “perhaps fearing that his story lacked sufficient punch.” None of it was true. At his core, Ronald Reagan didn’t see the government having a role to play in helping improve the quality of life of those who need a helping hand. As he said in his first inaugural address, “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”  What is so surprising about Reagan is that given all his talk about reducing the size and scope of government, he did not eliminate any major programs in his eight years in office. One thing that struck me about the movie was how different in many ways Ronald Reagan is from Donald Trump.  Reagan was sunny, upbeat and optimistic. He saw America as the Shinning City on the Hill with an important role to play in the world in defense of liberty and freedom where it was under attack. He saw America as a force for good in the world. Donald Trump is angry, vindictive, and pessimistic about our nation and its future, and talks about “American Carnage” and a dystopian world that only he can fix.  Trump is utterly indifferent to Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Ronald Reagan had utter disdain for Russian and other dictators around the world.  Donald Trump views them as role models to look up to. Ronald Reagan worked with, and had beers with, the Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill after 6:00 PM to pass tax and budget legislation.  Donald Trump refuses to work with Democrats no matter what the issue, and is constantly demeaning them. In 1986, Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act that legalized most illegal immigrants who had arrived in the country prior to January 1, 1984. The act altered U.S. immigration law by making it illegal to knowingly hire illegal immigrants, and established financial and other penalties for companies that employed illegal immigrants. In signing the bill Reagan lauded immigrants as a great asset to our nation. When presented with an opportunity to do something about the nation’s immigration problem, Donald Trump told Republicans in Congress not to support the bill because it would reduce the likelihood of his getting re-elected. Instead, he falls back on the racist dehumanizing trope of immigrants eating pets. With this in mind, I was not surprised when a dozen former Regan staff members recently announced their endorsement of Kamala Harris. In a letter announcing their endorsement; they indicated that they believed that if Reagan was alive today, he would have supported Harris. Irwin Stoolmacher is president of the Stoolmacher Consulting Group, a fundraising and strategic planning firm that works with nonprofit agencies that serve the truly needy among us.