'Remake of the political drama': How Trump’s focus on the Panama Canal mirrors Reagan’s

03 February

Donald Trump gestures at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S., December 22, 2024. REUTERS/Cheney Orr/File Photo

Like President Ronald Reagan, President Donald Trump is using the Panama Canal as a tool for geopolitical power, James Kirchick wrote in the Free Press on Monday.

Over the weekend, Trump said that the U.S. would “take back” the Panama Canal. “China is running the Panama Canal that was not given to China, that was given to Panama foolishly, but they violated the agreement, and we’re going to take it back, or something very powerful is going to happen,” Trump told reporters.

Kirchick noted that Panama had already announced they would distance themselves from China. “Panama seems impressed. It has already agreed to exit China’sBelt and Road infrastructure funding initiative. Also clear is that this geopolitical fight doubles as a bold domestic political move—Trump is tapping ‘something very powerful’ within the collective psyche of the American right.”

Reagan, who ran with the campaign slogan “let’s make America great again,” also had an interest in the Panama Canal. Kirchick writes: “Consciously or not, he is staging a remake of the political drama that unfolded five decades ago, in which then-outsider Ronald Reagan turned opposition to U.S. transfer of sovereignty over the Panama Canal into rocket fuel for his 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns.

“And then, as now, the canal issue served as a two-edged sword with which a newly assertive right, headed by an anti-Washington outsider, could smite both weak-kneed liberals and the GOP establishment. It’s impossible to grasp what Trump is doing now without understanding what Reagan did in the 1970s.”

In March 1976, Reagan referenced the Panama Canal at campaign rallies: “We bought it. We built it. It’s ours!” The phrase helped boost his campaign, although he ultimately lost to President Jimmy Carter. Still, it remained a key issue for him.

“Trump’s threat to grab the canal back eerily resembles Reagan’s opposition to ‘giving it away,’” Kirchick wrote. “In both cases, media and foreign policy elites failed to comprehend the political saliency of an issue they considered fringy and obscure.”

The focus was a sign of “the need to send a signal of strength to distant great powers, the Soviet Union for Reagan, and in Trump’s case, China, which he sees as having been granted special privileges by the waterway’s Panamanian operators.”

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