Donald Trump mostly wants to be President so that he can giver Fireside Chats about his erections.

There are plenty of reasons why a vulgar clown like Trump is a viable candidate in the current race, but I do believe the decline of the GOP as a serious party began with Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, their coded language of divisiveness (“welfare queens”), assault on the middle class and utter disdain for environmentalism. In many ways, Reagan was ultimately a reasonable man, but he pushed the right into a nostalgia for a past that had never quite existed except in Peggy Noonan’s greeting-card grade prose. The repeated inability of conservatives to deliver the impossible has driven the true believers over the edge.

Jacob Weisberg, who’s written a biography of Reagan, just did an AMA at Reddit, answering questions about 40. The writer’s contention that Reagan wasn’t a womanizer is naive, but it’s a lively give-and-take. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Which of the Republican candidates do you think has views that are closest to Ronald Reagan’s?

Jacob Weisberg:

Reagan would be a moderate in today’s GOP — he signed the biggest-ever immigration “amnesty” (his phrase) into law, supported handgun regulation, and played a huge in making abortion legal — and keeping it legal, by nominating Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. There’s no one running who supports those positions. In policy terms, I’d say the closest is John Kasich, because he’s more moderate than the others. Temperamentally, Marco Rubio seems the most Reagan-like to me. Rubio is optimistic and future-focused, where most of the others are pessimistic and negative about America’s future.

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Question:

There has been much discussion of the unusual age of the 2016 presidential election frontrunners vis a vis Reagan, with Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders all being at least as old upon potential inauguration as Reagan was. Is there such a thing as “too old” in your opinion, and if so how old is it?

Jacob Weisberg:

Life expectancy keeps increasing, and being 70 now doesn’t mean what it meant in 1980 – let alone what it meant in 1880. On the other hand, the presidency is physically very taxing — I’ve heard it said that a year in the White House takes the physical toll of two years outside of it. Reagan was a vigorous, healthy man when he took office, but he suffered from a number of health problems tied to age. I don’t know that there’s an age when you’re too old per se. Sanders definitely pushes the limit. It’s hard to imagine someone over 80, which he would be in a second term, being up to the demands of the job. But there are better reasons to not vote for Sanders, IMO.

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Question:

Who was Reagan’s favorite President? And how did he feel about Lincoln in particular?

Jacob Weisberg:

The President he admired the most in his own lifetime was FDR. He consciously modeled himself on FDR in many ways – including his Saturday Radio addresses, which were a reinvention of Roosevelt’s fireside chat. He borrowed some key phrases from Lincoln, like the America as the “last, best hope” of man on earth. But like all great political speechmakers, he borrowed liberally from his predecessors.

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Question:

What was your conclusion about his role in the end of the Cold War?

Jacob Weisberg:

I give him a lot of credit. Reagan was unusual on the right in thinking — as far back as 1962 — that communism might just collapse, because it was a ridiculous system. And he improvised to help it do so, moving from nuclear hawk in his first term to disarmament radical in his second. Both the push he gave the Soviets, and the support he gave Gorbachev, were crucial to the (mostly) peaceful collapse of the Soviet Empire.

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Question:

It’s commonly stated in leftist circles that Reagan was barely functioning in his second term due to advanced dementia/Alzheimer’s. In your opinion, how much truth is there to that assertion?

Jacob Weisberg:

Not just in leftist circles. His son, Ron Jr, thinks Reagan’s Alzheimer’s was affecting him pretty significantly by 1986 – the middle of his second term. There’s a lot of evidence to support that, including a study by some Alzheimer’s researchers I cite in my book that looks at his use of language in press conferences. That doesn’t mean he was barely functioning. Like a lot of people in the early stages of that disease, he had better days and worse days.

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Question:

Was he the womanizer that I have heard? Never met a female co-star he didn’t really, really like.

Jacob Weisberg: 

I wouldn’t call Reagan a womanizer. He does write about the tendency to always fall in love with the leading lady when he was younger. But I’ve never heard it argued that Reagan was anything other than faithful in his two marriages. During the period in between, after he divorced Jane Wyman, he definitely played the field and slept around in Hollywood. But I don’t think he enjoyed that very much — he was eager to settle down with someone, and Nancy ended up being his true soulmate.•