Ronald Reagan liked to tell stories.

As president he told one to a convention of Protestant ministers, about a preacher and a politician who died on the same day and were greeted by St.

People liked Reagan, even when they didn't like his policies.

Liberal Rockefeller Republicans coexisted with conservative Goldwater Republicans; conservative Southern Democrats shared their party with big-city liberals.

Things changed when Lyndon Johnson made civil rights a Democratic cause; those conservative Southerners began to leave the party for the Republicans.

Reagan was a conservative but a pragmatic one.

James Baker, Reagan's chief of staff and then-Treasury secretary, recalled, "If Reagan told me once, he told me fifteen thousand times, 'I'd rather get 80 percent of what I want than go over the cliff with my flags flying.'".

The Cold War didn't end until after Reagan left office, and its peaceful conclusion required adept diplomacy by George H.

Reagan left behind a different world than he had inherited.

Donald Trump rode the rhetoric of attack into office; in Trump's last days as president, the attack on government turned physically violent.

The Republican party of Donald Trump is not the Republican party of Ronald Reagan, but there is a recognizable lineage.

Reagan was not a racist, but by invoking "states' rights" as justification for his conservative policies, he let Southerners who were racists know they'd find a home in the Republican party, where Trump has done little to make them feel unwelcome.

Republicans have been slow to criticize Trump, even when he has egregiously overstepped what many of those Republicans once considered the bounds of decency and presidential decorum.

To some degree their reticence reflects the partisanship produced by the elimination of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats.

But it also follows the example of Reagan, who articulated what he called the Republican Eleventh Commandment: "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican." (Trump himself flouted that rule.).