The Reagan Echo on American Politics

How does the Trump administration's financial policies echo those of the Reagan administration?

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Published February 25th, 2026

Written by Anna Hunt

“Make America Great Again!” emerged in Ronald Reagan’s first campaign, selling Americans a new era after the economic failure under the Carter administration. Reagan's campaign promised patriotism and prosperity, campaigning to the American people with sentiments of white picket fences and big American flags. In practice, his policies of deregulation, sweeping tax cuts and regulatory deference jurisprudence created irreparable damage to the American middle class, per PBS News. Almost forty years later, another president would continue the policies Reagan had set into motion, bringing back the infamous “Make America Great Again!” The question, of course, is ‘great for whom?’

The Big Beautiful Bill, passed on July 4, 2025, is a tax-reform package that slashes corporate tax rates and doubles estate tax exemptions. It functions as a continuation of Reaganomics, embellished in patriotism, all while attempting to swallow the remaining middle class in America. It arrives as no surprise; the Big Beautiful Bill is a result of nearly three decades of jurisprudence that steadily broadened executive discretion and narrowed the space for redistributive policy. The federal government first undertook an agenda of deregulation and tax reform under Reagan, most famously, through the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 and the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Together, they strengthened a shift that broadened executive discretion and weakened any expectation that federal policy should redistribute economic power. Judicial decisions were vital in reinforcing this agenda.

The Reagan administration disguised deregulation as constitutionality, weaponizing jurisprudence enabled by the framework of Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc (1984) to withdraw regulatory oversight and expand executive authority. Chevron, originally applied in the context of the EPA, established that when a statute is ambiguous, courts must defer to administrative expertise. This effectively granted administrative agencies quasi-legislative discretion, ultimately allowing them to exercise what an article in the 1996 Columbia Law Review describes as “substantial policy making discretion” when statutes leave room for alternative interpretations. This shift enabled the Reagan administration to direct policymaking to benefit the economic actors that it was meant to constrain. Chevron marked the further establishment and protection of “trickle-down” ideology into the economy by normalizing executive withdrawal from regulatory responsibility. Reagan pursued deregulation through judicial deference, while the Trump administration capitalized on the post-Chevron era’s judicial skepticism to achieve the same end. Together, these trajectories culminated in the Big Beautiful Bill, formalizing the trickle-down constitutional order the case forged.

This convergence reflects a broader reshaping of constitutional political economy. The separation of powers is not being used to balance authority, but rather, to reinforce existing economic hierarchies. Starting in the Reagan era, the Supreme Court built a framework that sought to establish a baseline jurisprudence that treated markets as the natural baseline for intervention. Simultaneously, the Supreme Court wound up casting government intervention as something unusual that required special justification. The Big Beautiful Bill presumes, as Chevron implies, that administrative restraint is the default of federal governance.

The interpretive posture of Chevron heavily influenced the later decisions made in Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm'n (2010) and National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012), which consolidated the efforts of the Reagan administration. In 2010, Citizens United collapsed the line between market and political power by equating corporate spending with free speech. As Citizens United formalized, the Big Beautiful Bill presumes that corporate economic power is politically inert and off-limits to constitutional oversight. Citizens United took the market logic of Chevron and extended it into the Constitutional sphere. This affirmed corporate autonomy and expenditure merits the same First Amendment protections granted to individuals. Corporations were granted dual power as market participants and constitutional actors. Two years later, NFIB clarified the limits of congressional power over economic life. The Big Beautiful Bill capitalized on NFIB, operating under the presumption that redistributive policy is suspect unless structured as a tax in the minimal, highly constrained sense that NFIB deemed permissible. More specifically, in NFIB, the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate under Congress’s taxing authority — it rejected the argument that the mandate could be justified under the Commerce Clause. This distinction effectively constrained Congress’s capacity to regulate commerce directly, upholding that fiscal policy could be used to tax but not to redistribute or compel economic activity. In doing so, NFIB reinforced a principle embedded in Chevron — the law should be construed to limit active intervention in the economy, privileging structural neutrality and leaving substantial policymaking discretion to administratively or corporately controlled mechanisms rather than to legislative redistribution. Without the decades-long normalization of market primacy, the Big Beautiful Bill’s aggressive dedication to increasing capital accumulation would appear as a huge outlier, rather than inevitable.

The Big Beautiful Bill executed what Chevron, Citizens United and NFIB had theorized. It sought to transform shifting legal interpretation into statutory permanence. The bill preserved the 21% corporate income tax rate created in 2017, made full expenses permanent and expanded the estate and gift tax exemption to $15 million per individual, indexed to inflation. The Congressional Budget Office projected a $3.4 trillion increase in deficits, with most gains captured by high-income households and large corporations. It seeks to preserve corporate personhood and administrative deference. Chevron pushed the state to withdraw from regulation to preserve capital gains, Citizens United extended that retreat by framing corporate power as a form of protected expertise and NFIB redefined taxation as neutral instead of redistributive. The Big Beautiful Bill is the absorption of all three principles and the result of decades of judicial imbalance. Instead of correcting it, the Trump administration rebranded the economic inequality and injustice of the Reagan era, seeking to make it into statutory rule. This dramatically reduces the state’s economic ability to regulate the increasing wealth gap it once regulated. The Trump administration has dressed up decades of legal inheritance as patriotism, a reminder that anyone can sell injustice in America so long as it comes wrapped in a flag.

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