Republicans who served under President Ronald Reagan during the cold war have condemned Donald Trump’s move to soften relations with Russia and undermine the 80-year-old transatlantic alliance.

European leaders were left reeling last week when the US vice-president, JD Vance, told the Munich Security Conference that the greatest danger facing Europe was “the threat from within” and the “retreat from fundamental values”.

In January 2013, as US defense secretary, Leon Panetta lifted a ban on women serving in combat. Some time after January 2025, if Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for the role, is confirmed and stays true to his expressed position, that ban may be reimposed.

Twenty years after Reagan’s death, some think his relevance has diminished. They are mistaken.

I remember it like it was yesterday: sitting in the National Cathedral, hearing “Mansions of the Lord” somberly echoing through the rafters. I remember watching the horse-drawn caisson carry the casket to the Capitol, my young children at my side. It is hard to believe it’s been 20 years since President Ronald Reagan “slipped the surly bonds of Earth.”

Less than a decade ago, all but a few Republicans in Congress would have taken the title of “Reagan Republican” as a badge of honor.

The 40th president’s “peace through strength” mantra guided decades of GOP philosophy on foreign affairs, with generations of Republicans emulating Ronald Reagan’s vision for modernizing the military and investing in alliances abroad.

But these days, as the GOP remakes itself in the image of Donald Trump, the moniker of “Reagan Republican” is no longer the proud distinction it once was.

It’s more like a MAGA epithet.

Patti Davis, daughter of former President Ronald Reagan, said he doesn’t think her father would be embraced by today’s Republican Party ― and that the feeling would be mutual.

“I don’t think he would... and I don’t see how he would want to be in it,” she told CNN’s Jim Acosta on Sunday. “It’s so diametrically opposed to what he believed and to the dignity that he felt that people in government should have.”

Since Mike Johnson’s recent ascent to House speaker, food insecurity advocates have been sounding the alarm. As Politico reported last week, Johnson is a proponent of more hard-line efforts to overhaul America’s largest anti-hunger program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which currently serves over 40 million people. 

In 2018, per the publication, he referred to SNAP as “our nation’s most broken and bloated welfare program.” 

John Hinckley Jr, who tried to kill then-President Ronald Reagan in a bid to impress actress Jodie Foster 40 years ago, received an 'unconditional release' from his remaining court-monitored supervision five years after being freed from a mental hospital, a judge ruled Monday. 

Attorneys for John Hinckley Jr. argued that the 66-year-old would-be assassin is 'no longer a threat', and that he should not be held to a series of court-imposed restrictions that were put in place after he was released from a 35-year stint in a Washington mental hospital in 2016.

Aquarter-century ago, I and other members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet urged him to reject the Republican proposal to end welfare. It was too punitive, we said, subjecting poor Americans to deep and abiding poverty. But Clinton’s political advisers warned that unless he went along, he would jeopardize his re-election.

That was the end of welfare as we knew it. As Clinton boasted in his State of the Union address to Congress that year: “The era of big government is over.”