Trump is Reagan's Fault

How 40 Years of Corporate Power Built Today’s Crisis

Reagan’s policies fundamentally reshaped America to favor the wealthy while undermining everyone else. He institutionalized neoliberalism through degregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and privatization. His administration implemented mechanisms to continually erode middle-class prosperity. His war on labor decimated unions, crushed strikes, and weakened collective power. His racially charged rhetoric and cuts to social programs accelerated inequality.

Meanwhile, the repeal of the fairness doctrine set the stage for today’s hyper-partisan misinformation deluge and oligarch-owned media. Combined with ballooning debt, fractional banking and unethical financialization, you can trace a direct line from Reagan’s betrayal of the working class to today’s billionaire-takeover of government.

Trump is merely a symptom of a 40 year disease.

Step 1: Reagan’s Corporate Counter-Revolution and the Birth of Misinformed Populism

In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to “get America working again.” The deeper reality was that his election marked the beginning of a full-scale corporate takeover of government—one that would lead directly to the billionaire-driven authoritarianism we see today under Trump.

Reagan’s win was the culmination of a deliberate effort by corporate America to dismantle the New Deal and prevent another FDR-style economic system from ever returning. That effort began with the Powell Memo of 1971, in which Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell explicitly advised corporate leaders to infiltrate academia, media, and political institutions to reshape the public discourse in favor of corporate power.

Killing Media Oversight: The Death of the Fairness Doctrine

1. In 1987, Reagan’s FCC eliminated the Fairness Doctrine, the rule that required broadcast networks to present balanced, fact-based news coverage.

2. Before this repeal, news organizations couldn’t just flood the airwaves with partisan propaganda masquerading as journalism.

3. The repeal created a media free-for-all, birthing an ideological, for-profit news model crafted not to inform but to radicalize and control.

4. This decision directly led to the rise of Rush Limbaugh-style talk radio, Fox News, and eventually, the algorithm-driven misinformation networks that today allow billionaires like Elon Musk to flood public discourse with manipulated narratives.

With oversight gone, corporate-funded media spent the next 30 years convincing America that billionaires were heroic job creators while the government was the enemy.

The Myth of Hyper-Individualism: Manufacturing Consent for Greed

Reagan’s policies also championed a cultural reprogramming of America toward hyper-individualism—the idea that people succeed or fail solely based on their own efforts, regardless of systemic inequalities created by corporate power.

1. Labor unions were gutted, leaving workers isolated in their struggles.

2. Social safety nets were demonized as “handouts,” reinforcing the idea that poverty was a personal failing, not a consequence of corporate policies.

3. Billionaires were rebranded not as exploiters of labor, but as geniuses who “earned” their riches and trickled-down wealth to everyone else. This idea, still dominant today, made it politically impossible to pass regulation that could curb wealth hoarding.

The combination of deliberate media radicalization and hyper-individualist philosophy created the illusion that working-class people had more in common with billionaires than with each other. This was one of Reagan’s most successful legacies.

Step 2: Clinton & the Financialization of the Economy

By the 1990s, Reagan’s economic framework had fundamentally reshaped America. In theory, Bill Clinton was a Democrat; in practice, he embraced and expanded Reagan’s corporate policies, normalizing them within both parties.

1. The repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 allowed big banks to gamble recklessly, leading directly to the 2008 financial crisis.

2. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 wiped out ownership restrictions, allowing megacorporations to buy up all media channels. The result: half a dozen corporations now control nearly all American news.

3. NAFTA accelerated deindustrialization, forcing millions of jobs overseas while increasing corporate profits.

Clinton’s policies deepened economic inequality and institutionalized the financialization of everything:

1. Billionaires no longer needed to create tangible goods—they could extract wealth by manipulating the stock market and fractional reserve banking (which allows banks to issue many times more money than they actually have).

2. The financial sector replaced manufacturing as the core of the U.S. economy, ensuring that money made money, while workers lost ground.

Step 3: The Bush Era and the Rise of the War Economy

By the early 2000s, the blueprint for disaster was well-established: corporate monopolization of media, unregulated billionaire-driven capitalism, and a fragile economy built not on wages, but on debt.

This was the perfect environment for George W. Bush and the neocon cabal of corporate war profiteers. The 9/11 attacks created an opportunity to expand crony capitalism under the guise of national security.

1. The Patriot Act set a precedent for mass surveillance, which today allows tech billionaires to collect, sell, and manipulate data for political control.

2. The War on Terror funneled trillions into defense contractors, enriching companies like Lockheed Martin, while gutting social spending at home.

3. The 2008 financial crash, caused by deregulated gambling on the stock market, wiped out middle-class wealth—but banks got bailed out while homeowners did not.

This era accelerated an important phenomenon: the disillusionment of the middle class with government. People weren’t wrong to feel betrayed, but they were fed manufactured rage, directed away from billionaires and toward immigrants, public workers, and government itself.

Step 4: 2008 Crash and the Birth of Faux-Populism

When millions of Americans lost their homes in 2008, Obama’s election represented a chance for reform. Instead, largely due to institutional pressures, his administration saved Wall Street, not working people—reinforcing the idea that government did not work for the people.

This fueled:

1. The Tea Party, a billionaire-funded movement masquerading as grassroots populism, which turned economic anxiety into weaponized anti-government extremism.

2. The further consolidation of corporate media, enabling radicalized narratives with no accountability.

3. The rise of Facebook, algorithm-driven media, and online radicalization, which led directly to the misinformed faux-populism of Trump’s base.

By this point, America’s economic system was designed to extract money from the working class, send it to billionaires, and blame government for the resulting suffering.

The final step was simple: convince people that billionaires were their true champions and that democracy itself was the enemy.

Step 5: Trump, the Complete Merger of Corporate and Government Power

Trump’s election in 2016 was a perfect storm of Reagan’s corporatism, Clintonian neoliberalism, Bush’s war economy, and Obama’s failed institutionalism.

But his second term, backed openly by Musk, Bezos, and tech elites, goes far beyond anything Reagan could have imagined.

In Trump’s second administration:

1. Billionaires are literally raiding the U.S. Treasury—Musk now controls financial infrastructure.

2. Mass purges of federal employees have handed control to corporate loyalists.

3. Medicaid, Social Security, and public services are being gutted to fund another round of historic billionaire tax cuts in 2025.

4. Elon Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg actively shape the news cycle, ensuring that criticism of corporate power is drowned in algorithmic distraction.

This Supreme Court, built with Reagan and Bush-era appointees, will ensure that elections increasingly become ceremonial—rubber-stamping billionaire rule rather than serving as functional democracy.

The Final Step: Where We Go From Here

For 40 years, corporate power has reprogrammed Americans to believe that:

1. Government is incompetent and must be dismantled.

2. Billionaires "deserve" their wealth, even when they extract it at the cost of human lives.

3. Media manipulation isn’t happening, even as it directly shapes public consciousness.

The U.S. today is not suffering from incompetence—it is suffering from a 40-year corporate coup.

The only option is to force a reckoning before elites consolidate total control. That requires:

1. A rejection of billionaire hero worship.

2. A recognition that government sabotage is intentional, not accidental.

3. Mass mobilization against policies that entrench wealth consolidation.

If we fail to do this, democracy will not "die"—it will be slowly sold, piece by piece, until the last remnants belong to the billionaires who rigged the system in the first place.