In late May, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent delivered remarks ahead of the 2026 Reagan National Economic Forum and twice quoted former president Ronald Reagan about the importance of learning from mistakes. Two months prior, U.S. Vice President JD Vance called Reagan a “great Irishman” during a visit to the vice presidential residence from Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin.
On the other side of the aisle, Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s democratic socialist mayor, said at a mid-May press conference that he couldn’t help but think of Reagan’s remark that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,’” which he called a “good quote.” He quickly added, “I think nine more terrifying words are actually, ‘I worked all day and can’t feed my family.’”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said a week earlier that “I don’t usually quote Ronald Reagan, but ‘tear down that wall.’” Two months before that, she said that Reagan “might even be considered a Democrat today given the contrast of the party, but who knows?”
Some 22 years after Reagan’s death, Republicans are divided on whether he or U.S. President Donald Trump has done the best job as president in the past 40 years, with between 32% and 38% preferring Reagan and between 14% and 63% saying Trump, depending on the conservative subgroup, per recent Pew Research Center data.
A new survey from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute suggests that adherents of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement agree with the principles of the foundation’s namesake more than the public might think based on news reports.
“People are investing in us because they see something valuable for today. That’s the key point,” Roger Zakheim, Washington director of the Ronald Reagan Institute, told JNS during a tour of its building, across the street from the White House.
“Those ideas, the founding principles that we seek to drive top of mind in discussions about policy, are very much where the American people are writ large, and certainly conservatives, Republicans, and one of the things we’ve led on explaining, where MAGA Republicans are,” Zakheim said.
“The notion that Reaganism and MAGA Trumpism are disparate is completely off,” he told JNS.
The institute’s new survey suggests that MAGA Republicans between the ages of 18 and 29 “care deeply about America leading in the world,” Zakheim said. “They care deeply about freedom and democracy.”
That demographic is depicted in the news as a bunch of inward-looking “groypers,” or followers of the racist and antisemitic podcaster Nick Fuentes.
“There is reason for optimism, and it’s rooted in truly going into where the American people are based on data, not based on some podcaster, some viral media clip of young, radicalized Americans, who are asking hateful questions at some convening on a campus,” Zakheim told JNS.
“It’s there, but it’s a narrow slice,” he said. “We are in the business of actually trying to amplify and share where the American people overall are.”
Talking to JNS in a conference room with a model of the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) on a table, Zakheim said that the institute aims in its surveys to inform the nation, leaders, policymakers and public intellectuals about what the American people, and conservatives and MAGA Republicans in particular, think “MAGA” means.
“There are a lot of people who want to say what it is. Tucker Carlson wanted to say what it was for a while. Vice President Vance wants to say what it is, and no doubt if he’s the nominee, he will say, ‘Hey, I am the legacy of MAGA,’” Zakheim said. “That’s fine. He’s on the ticket. He’s as well-positioned as anybody to say that.”
“But we can demonstrate exactly what MAGA Republicans think MAGA is about,” he said. “In a lot of ways, it overlaps with Reaganism.”
‘Reviving the dead’
Midway through the hour-long tour, JNS asked Zakheim if the kind of thing that he is doing, helping people understand how the late 40th president remains relevant today, involves exercising a muscle that is particularly familiar to Orthodox Jews.
“I think faith helps. No question,” he said. “For me, my sort of deliberate remark for people asking, ‘So what do you do at the Reagan Institute?’ I say, ‘I’m in the business of techiyat hameytim,’” reviving the dead.
“It’s a joke, but there’s actually some depth there,” he told JNS. “Because zachur, ‘memory,’ it’s the heart of who we are as a faith, and I think it’s probably—not being expert in other faiths, but I have a familiarity with them—part of generally faith-oriented people overall.”
“But it’s not limited to it either,” he said. “I think it’s fundamentally American, actually.”
Zakheim noted America’s looming 250th birthday.
“We are constantly revisiting and understanding what is originalism. We are going back to the roots of what we’re about. That’s what the Declaration is. That’s what the Constitution is,” he said.
“Being America and being American fundamentally is about understanding and striving to realize that ‘more perfect union,’” he added.
The framers were people of faith who sought to create a second Israel in the United States. “The founders of our country saw what they were doing as very similar to what God and the Israelites did as they left Egypt, which is they founded the Jewish nation before they entered the Jewish state, or the Jewish territory or the land,” Zakheim said.
“That’s pretty much the story of America, too,” he told JNS. “We had this declaration. It was far more important to our founding than it was to the land itself and the sovereign borders.”
The impeccably dressed institute director, an Orthodox Jew who grew up in Washington, where his father, Dov Zakheim, served in senior Pentagon positions during the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, spoke to JNS while leading a private tour of the building, which used to be the Motion Picture Association of America—the trade group that created the film-rating system.
“The house that Jack Valenti built,” Zakheim said, referring to the former special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson who led the MPAA from 1966 to 2004. “This ugly, brutalist building that was long past its time—a metaphor actually for the organization. They reinvented themselves with streaming and everything like that.”
The Trammell Crow real estate company bought the building, “took it down to the studs, and now we are in this modern building, glass house sort of thing,” Zakheim told JNS, of the building that the institute now owns and where it has a “small but mighty” staff of about 25.
Growing up in the Washington area in the 1980s, in the neighborhood where he still lives, politics was a frequent discussion at home, but it didn’t dominate everything.
“It was far more about the Redskins and the Orioles than it was Ronald Reagan,” he told JNS. “I knew that Ronald Reagan liked jelly beans, and so did I. It was a pleasant voice to listen to.”
He never met Reagan, though I knew his father worked for him.
“I got a sense that he was an optimistic person who was patriotic. American pride was something I totally absorbed in my childhood,” he said. “I remember going in 1986 with my dad to Liberty Weekend, where we rededicated the Statue of Liberty in the Harbor of New York.”
Washington startup
Growing up in the 1980s, Republicans and Jews didn’t mix very much.
“I grew up and am a Modern Orthodox Jew in a Modern Orthodox community. To the extent there was interaction between my religious life and my religious community and politics, it was points of tension,” Zakheim told JNS. “Now that probably sounds foreign to people, because of course if you’re pro-Israel and a Jew you’re going to be a Republican.”
His work at the institute, which he co-founded, had nothing to do with his childhood, as he tells it.
Zakheim was working for the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who moved to the Reagan Library after his district was redrawn. On a trip to the library, he asked whether it offered any defense programming, especially given that Reagan had rebuilt the U.S. military. He was told that it did not.
So Zakheim started the Reagan National Defense Forum, which continues as a program of the institute. He left Capitol Hill and practiced law—a better fit for multiple-day school tuitions, he told JNS.
“I sort of pulled a Dick Cheney when the executive director in California said, ‘Hey, we’re starting this institute. We’re looking for somebody,” Zakheim said. “He said, ‘Can you help?’ I said, ‘No problem.’”
“I thought about it. I’m like, ‘I think I found somebody,’” he said. “That’s when I left the practice of law and said goodbye to billing in increments of six minutes and started working for the 40th president. It’s great. He never changes his mind.”
Building the institute, which is the D.C. office of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute and which Nancy Reagan envisioned to “bring Ronnie back to Washington,” eight years ago, was like working at a startup.
“It’s basically this amazing canvas, and they gave me a bunch of crayons and colors,” Zakheim said.
Having a public policy arm is “pretty unique” for presidential foundations, according to Zakheim. The institute has four pillars: peace through strength, individual liberty, economic opportunity, and freedom and democracy.”
“When you come in here, the idea was you’re not walking back into the 1980s. You want to see what the 1980s was like, you go to California at the Reagan Library, an amazing space, and you can see what President Reagan did in his time,” Zakheim told JNS. “This is supposed to feel like I’m in the present or with a view to the future.”
Academia hasn’t sufficiently embraced people who work on presidential history writ large, and Reagan in particular, according to Zakheim.
“We do here,” he told JNS in front of a two-story digital wall, which is visible from the street and which visitors who come in daily for public tours can manipulate to learn more about the president.
“We cultivate those scholars. We try to give them pathways into the world of the academy and thought leadership,” he said.
There is a store on-site selling items like “Reagan Bush 84” t-shirts, cowboy hats, caps, small sculptures of Reagan, mugs, books, jelly beans, bumper stickers and copies of White House place settings.
To Zakheim, though, one of the most important things the institute does is its surveys.
“Immodestly but accurately, since 2018, we have done the deepest dives into the views of the American people on foreign policy, national security and defense,” he told JNS. “Nobody has more data behind where the American people are on those questions.”
“It’s kind of crazy. We spend half of our discretionary budget, broadly speaking, on foreign policy and defense, but it’s generally not where the Gallups of the world focus,” he said. “We saw that as a gap, and we drive the conversation.”
“Freedom”
Reagan and former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had a “complicated relationship,” according to Zakheim.
“This job has allowed me to do a mid-career doctorate in a president—not that any academic institution would give me a doctorate in it,” he told JNS.
Begin’s party was Herut, “freedom,” and Reagan wrote the word “freedom” in almost every sentence, according to Zakheim. “It’s always there.”
“They had two very different conceptions of freedom,” he said.
For Reagan, freedom was an American notion, which was “hyperfocused” on individual freedom, “because that’s what our republic was founded to provide and protect,” Zakheim said. “Begin’s life’s purpose was to create national freedom for the Jewish people.”
National freedom and individual freedom from the state “complement each other often,” he said. “But when Begin and Reagan interacted, it was almost the contrast. The tension was manifest more. It’s remarkable—men of the same generation, entirely different experiences out of the early 20th century.”
JNS asked to what extent Reagan’s Christian faith impacted his view on Israel.
“My assumption is that it would have informed his Zionism and support for Israel, but I haven’t seen evidence for it. I haven’t searched for it either,” Zakheim said. “But it’s disappointing to me that Reagan and Begin didn’t have a closer relationship. Lebanon got in the way of that relationship in profound ways.”
Even before that, airborne warning and control systems (AWACS) “created tension between them day one,” according to Zakheim.
“Reagan had a proof of sale of that platform to Saudi Arabia, and AIPAC and Begin came out against it,” he said. “They used all the tactics, some of which upset the president, who viewed himself as Israel’s strongest supporter and no greater friend had ever occupied the White House in Reagan’s mind than him.”
“Yet, when he did something in the U.S. interest that Israel felt was against their interest, they came after him hard,” he said. “It’s tough.”
In a room with photos and artifacts reflecting Reagan’s ranch, Zakheim discussed a different aspect of the 40th president.
“People think of Reagan as a Hollywood actor, which is a very important part of who he was,” he said. “The superficial critique is an actor, but people don’t realize he actually understood how to connect with people, which is a big, big part of the presidency.”
“Reagan, at some point, said, ‘I don’t know how you could be president and not be an actor,’ and that was viewed as sort of humorous,” Zakheim said. “But actually, there’s some real depth to that. The ranch is the other side of the president. Very modest.”
Yet another side of Reagan is his editing.
Near a sculpture by Chas Fagan of Reagan preparing to give his “Tear down this wall” speech at Brandenburg Gate—a sculpture which contains part of the Berlin Wall embedded in a book and a companion of which is at the U.S. embassy in Berlin—Zakheim directed JNS to copies of Reagan’s prepared remarks.
“One of the reasons why I love this display case—I don’t get credit for it being here, but there’s wisdom in having it. You see the cards, and it says ‘Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate’ and ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,’” he said.
“People are less familiar with the words before and after, but I think they’re equally important,” he said. “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate.”
“I understand the fear of war and the pain of division that afflict this continent, and I pledge to you my country’s efforts to help overcome these burdens,” Reagan added.
“Could you imagine if President Trump took a trip to UAE with the Strait of Hormuz behind him, and he said to the Iranian people and the leadership, ‘If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity, if you seek liberalization, open the strait,’” he said.
Another popular narrative on the Left that Zakheim wanted to dispel was of Reagan as “a movie actor, who read whatever script he was given.”
“That couldn’t be further from the truth,” he told JNS. “You see his edits to the speech.”
The U.S. State Department and National Security Council told him to take out the reference to “tear down this wall.”
“They thought it would be provocative for a variety of reasons. Ruin your relationship with Gorbachev. Put at risk the negotiations,” Zakheim said. “But he looked at the world and looked at the wall through a moral lens. He was never going to compromise that. He kept it in there.”
