'What do we stand for?': Reagan Library director reflects on Trump, the state of the GOP

WASHINGTON — For the past two years, John Heubusch and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation have hosted almost all the top 2024 Republican hopefuls, formally running or otherwise — except for former President Donald Trump — to pour out their souls on why the Republican Party is in crisis and how it can change its course.

“In 2020, Republicans lost control of the White House, we lost the House, the Senate. And a lot of people approached us with the thought that we should try to play a constructive role in acting essentially as a venue or as a stage for the Republican Party to look inside itself to question where it was at the time,” the foundation's executive director told Yahoo News in a wide-ranging interview.

“Are there any course corrections or changes that might need to be made? What really are the fundamentals of the modern-day Republican Party? What do we stand for?”

If the postmortem on 2012’s presidential election delivered solutions with a clinician’s sense of detachment, the Reagan Library’s “A Time for Choosing” speaker series has delivered emotional paeans about the party’s raison d’être.

Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., longtime GOP power player Dick Cheney's daughter, who was bounced from the party leadership for breaking from Trump, used the platform to argue that freedom is protected and preserved by individuals acting on the principles ensconced in the founding of the United States — and that it often takes a woman to muster the courage that her male colleagues cannot.

The Reagan Library also welcomed Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire, one of the leaders of the hard-right nationalist movement undergirding Trump’s rise. Thiel used the stage to urge his fellow Republicans to place China at the center of a new Cold War and to use that to unite the party and the country against a common adversary.

But the reigning leader of the party is Trump, who was impeached twice, once for refusing to provide military aid to Ukraine unless its government launched an investigation of his political rival, and a second time on charges that he caused the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol in an effort to cling on to power. Now, with his arraignment on 34 felony counts stemming from accusations that he paid hush money to a porn star in 2016, Trump appears to have remade the 2024 race for president into a referendum on himself. Again.

“Everyone knew exactly where Donald Trump came from and wanted to go,” Heubusch said. “This was an opportunity to give all the other voices a chance to state their viewpoint. And I think it turned out really well. I've no doubt if the former president wants to speak as part of the series, of course we’d have been delighted to have him. But we didn't really see the necessity.”

Heubusch hasn’t taken sides. Whether he’s a Never Trumper, a Trump loyalist or somewhere in between, he hasn’t let on.

Asked about Trump’s arrest on charges stemming from the payment of $130,000 to the porn star Stormy Daniels to allegedly cover up an affair, Heubusch commented, “I make of it that the Democrat Party has decided that until his last dying breath, it is going to badger, poke, prod, insult, oppose — use whatever word you want — Donald Trump. And this is just one more example of it.”

Heubusch is a veteran operator who ran the National Republican Senatorial Committee decades ago, under then-Sen. Al D’Amato, R-N.Y. In 2009 he was selected by Nancy Reagan and others to run the Reagan Library.

Ronald Reagan, he said, always believed in the “big tent,” and the mission of bringing people into the party. But with the advent of Trump-branded national populism, what used to be bedrock issues, like cutting government spending and reducing the national debt, have fallen by the wayside.

“There's no doubt the party is at odds with itself at times. It's changing its viewpoint, [with] the populism that President Trump brought to the table,” Heubusch said, adding that there are "so many differences in the modern-day Republican Party, it doesn't have that kind of cohesiveness that it had under Ronald Reagan.”

The library’s speaker series is named after a 1964 speech Reagan gave in support of Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. Reagan framed the ideas that would come to dominate conservatism and the Republican Party through his time in office, and after: limited government, individual liberty and a strong, hawkish national defense.

But that was almost 60 years ago. Now Republicans find themselves split on issues like protecting Ukraine, a European democracy, against the continuing onslaught from Russia.

“If he were president, it's absolutely impossible to conceivably imagine Russia invading Ukraine, because Reagan, from a peace-through-strength standpoint, would have had the Ukrainians armed to the teeth from the very beginning,” Heubusch said. America’s adversaries, like Russia and China, are “doing more than taunting and challenging: They're out there invading. And so I think we are seeing the results of cracks in the peace-through-strength armor and America's willingness to step forward and to promote and defend democracy where it needs to be done."

Heubusch is wrapping his 14-year tenure of service running the library and foundation with a chilling exhibit on the horrors of Auschwitz.

The trailer teasing the exhibition opens with a quote from Primo Levi, the author, chemist and Auschwitz survivor: “It happened, therefore it can happen again: This is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.”

There has been a shocking rise in antisemitism across the U.S. with the rise of Trump, including his own decision to dine in November with the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and the rap superstar Kanye West, who has made antisemitic remarks.

“Today in the United States, we are at each other's throats. I mean, this is bordering on the definition of hatred,” Heubusch said, comparing such hatred to "the seeds that were sown that eventually led to the Holocaust.”

“Germany at the time was one of the most, if not the most, advanced nation in the world in terms of intellect and technology,” he added. “And yet it could happen there. So if it could happen there, then it could happen in the future and other places — and it must not.”