The drug war and mass incarceration
In the 2015 episode with Lucy Steigerwald, Reagan enters as the president who escalated drug enforcement. Steigerwald states that the increase in the prison population began to explode three decades earlier when “Ronald Reagan, our supposed small-government friend, decided to really just kick up the war on drugs, to militarize the war on drugs.” She ties that decision to a prison and jail population of 2.3 million, against roughly 300,000 prison inmates three decades before. Lucy Steigerwald on The Drug War and Private Prisons (2015)
Steigerwald’s account places Reagan at the head of a broader critique of the criminal justice system. She argues the war on drugs diverts police, that civil asset forfeiture prioritizes drug crimes because seized cash, materials and cars can be sold for revenue, and that mandatory minimums kept people imprisoned longer for drug and non-violent gun crimes. Bob Zadek agrees the system is a disaster, and adds that it is a disaster for everybody except the Corrections Corporation of America and the California Prison Guards Union. Lucy Steigerwald on The Drug War and Private Prisons (2015)
The episode frames drug criminalization within a constitutional argument about federal authority. Zadek distinguishes malum per se acts, wrong in themselves, from malum prohibitum acts, bad only because government says so, and places the war on drugs in the second category, asserting that no society in history treated drug use as criminal until the early 20th-century United States. He asks why the 18th Amendment was needed to give Congress power over alcohol while no amendment was sought for drug prohibition, and criticizes reliance on taxing statutes and the Commerce Clause. Steigerwald credits state-level organizing, citing marijuana legalization on the 2012 ballot in Colorado and legalization in Colorado and Washington state, as the way to put the federal government’s back against the wall. Lucy Steigerwald on The Drug War and Private Prisons (2015)
The Reagan reference here is not incidental. It is the episode’s causal hinge: a president presented as friendly to small government is said to have begun the escalation that produced mass incarceration, and the constitutional objections to federal drug power are argued against the backdrop of that legacy.
Trade policy and special interests
Reagan returns in the 2020 episode with Casey Mulligan, this time on trade. Bob Zadek, calling Reagan one of his heroes in American history, asks Mulligan to explain Trump’s tariffs in light of Reagan’s record, saying his own views of Reagan’s approach to foreign trade are “kind of misplaced a bit.” Mulligan answers that Reagan could explain the virtues of free international trade better than almost anyone, including Milton Friedman, but did not practice it: special interests in Washington get served, steel and car companies among them, and Reagan served them as other presidents had. You’re Hired! Chief Economic Adviser to Trump on What It’s Really Like to Work in the White House (2020)
The mechanism Mulligan names is the quota. He describes Reagan telling Japanese car companies, for example, that only so many cars could be sent to the United States, with the Japanese companies deciding which cars to send. He reports that Japanese companies liked the arrangement because they no longer competed with one another for space in the American market, and that Reagan people told him Japanese companies would come to the White House during the Reagan years and ask for a quota. The American car companies benefited from keeping out competition, while American consumers of automobiles paid more, and paid more both to Japanese and to American companies. You’re Hired! Chief Economic Adviser to Trump on What It’s Really Like to Work in the White House (2020)
Mulligan draws a comparison between Reagan’s quotas and Trump’s tariffs. Both raise costs to consumers, and domestic producers are the special interests served; Mulligan says Trump did very few quotas and used tariffs instead, so the money went into the Treasury rather than to Chinese companies, which he calls an improvement. He cites Milton Friedman writing in the Wall Street Journal in the ’80s that Reagan was so bad with quotas that it would actually be an improvement to have a tariff man. You’re Hired! Chief Economic Adviser to Trump on What It’s Really Like to Work in the White House (2020)
A second Reagan-era trade issue Mulligan identifies is intellectual property. In Reagan’s day, he says, the Japanese and other East Asian tigers were not respecting American copyrights and other intellectual property; Reagan threatened tariffs but did not impose many, and in his second term obtained trade deals with Japan and Asian tigers to respect those rights. Mulligan says the same issue now arises with China, and that while some Chicago-trained economists in the Reagan years recommended tariffs as a way to change such behavior, no economist recommends that now. You’re Hired! Chief Economic Adviser to Trump on What It’s Really Like to Work in the White House (2020)
The portrait is of a president whose rhetoric and practice diverged. Zadek’s own hero-worship is qualified on air, and Mulligan’s chapter, circulated to Reagan people, drew the confirming anecdote about Japanese quota requests.
Obiter dicta
Two further episodes mention Reagan only in passing. In the 2020 episode with Kim Kavin on worker-classification law, Bob Zadek quotes Reagan’s “very famous comment”: “The most dangerous words you can ever hear is ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” The quotation serves Zadek’s argument about the origins of the Dynamex standard, and is not attributed to Kavin. Terrible New Worker “Protection” Laws Threaten the Gig Economy (2020)
In the 2020 election episode, Bob Zadek commends to listeners Peter Wallison’s book Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency, naming it in his closing remarks alongside Wallison’s dissent from the majority report on the financial crisis. Reagan appears here only as the subject of a guest’s book, not as part of the episode’s argument about mail-in balloting and succession. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)
Across episodes: Reagan as a contested benchmark
The excerpts show the same underlying question argued in more than one episode: whether Reagan’s record matched his reputation for small government and free markets. The treatment changes with the subject matter rather than with time. In the 2015 drug-war episode, Lucy Steigerwald supplies the indictment and Bob Zadek amplifies it, with Reagan named as the president who militarized the drug war. In the 2020 trade episode, Zadek supplies the hero-worship and Casey Mulligan supplies the qualification, with Reagan named as a practitioner of quotas and special-interest favors; the earlier episode’s Reagan is a small-government friend who failed, the later episode’s Reagan is a free-trade evangelist who did not practice what he preached. The two episodes are consistent in treating Reagan’s stated principles as separable from his actions, though neither guest refers to the other’s episode.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not give Reagan’s dates in office, his party affiliation in any explicit statement, the names of legislation he signed, or the details of any court case decided during his presidency. They do not describe his drug policy beyond the militarization attributed to him in the 2015 episode, nor the specific quota agreements or trade deals beyond the Japanese car and intellectual-property examples. The 2020 election episode’s reference to Wallison’s book does not state what the book argues. No excerpt states where Reagan was born, when he died, or which offices he held before the presidency.