Michael Reagan, a longtime political commentator for radio, TV and print media, and the eldest son of President Ronald Reagan, died Jan. 4 from cancer, a conservative group affiliated with the former president said Tuesday. He was 80 years old.
A longtime Republican like his father, Mr. Reagan espoused conservative opinions, advocating antiabortion views, stressing adherence to Christianity and expressing skepticism about green policies. Like many in his party, he was initially a critic of President Donald Trump, describing him as an “egomaniacal billionaire” and a “political train wreck” who had little chance of winning in 2016. When Trump defied the odds and won, Mr. Reagan embraced him, decrying the “liberal media” that he said hated Trump.
But Mr. Reagan’s political outspokenness and his famous father appeared to overshadow his lifelong struggle with scars suffered during a tumultuous childhood. He first heard at the age of 4 that he had been adopted, and he was sexually molested at the age of 7 by a camp counselor — experiences that molded his political views and prompted him to turn to religion for solace.
Mr. Reagan kept the molestation a secret for decades, partly out of fear that revealing it could ruin his dad’s political career. Mr. Reagan finally told his father in 1987, as the president was nearing the end of his second term and when Mr. Reagan was writing a memoir. The book was going to contain the story, so Mr. Reagan felt compelled to tell his father beforehand.
“Now here I am at the ranch. Dad’s standing in front of me with his belt buckle on, and it looks like a brand new pair of cowboy boots. Nancy’s on my left side. Nancy and Dad say, ‘So what’s in the book we don’t know about?’ I had to tell Dad, and I couldn’t look at him,” he recalled in a later interview.
“The hardest thing was telling him the act. It was not enough to tell him, ‘Geez, Dad, I was molested,’ but the act … that was the toughest thing. I got all done. My dad looked at me and said, ‘Where’s this guy? I’ll kick his butt.’ My dad didn’t walk away, didn’t say he hated me. I thought to myself, Why didn’t I do this years ago? But I couldn’t have years ago. God brought me to the right moment in 1987.”
Michael Edward Reagan was born on March 18, 1945, in Los Angeles. Born to unmarried parents John Bourgholtzer, an Army soldier, and Essie Irene Flaugher, his birth name was John Charles Flaugher. The Reagans changed his name after adopting him. Mr. Reagan often joked that he was born German but became Irish at 3 days old, referring to the Reagans’ Irish roots.
Mr. Reagan first learned he was adopted from his 8-year-old sister Maureen. When Mr. Reagan asked their mother, actress Jane Wyman, what the word “adopted” meant, she first gave a stern look to Maureen before telling her son that he had been chosen so he was special. “Let’s not ever talk about it again,” Wyman told her children.
But when Mr. Reagan went to boarding school a few years later and told a classmate that he was special, he was bullied.
“He comes back to me, ‘You were not chosen; you’re illegitimate,’” Mr. Reagan said in a 2008 interview. “So the kids started teasing me in school that I wasn’t a real Reagan. I was the ‘Bastard Reagan,’ the illegitimate Reagan.”
Mr. Reagan didn’t understand what “illegitimate” meant. So he consulted the Bible, and found a verse that said “all the illegitimate children and their children until the 10th generation will never enter the kingdom of Heaven.”
“I closed the Bible. This is like 1951. [I] didn’t reopen the Bible until 1978.”
The pain pushed him toward self-hate and anger. His parents’ subsequent divorce and the crime he suffered at the hands of a child molester exacerbated the negative emotions. As a high school student, he told himself he was condemned and blamed himself for his molestation.
“I thought I was living a lie because no one knew what I had done. I questioned my sexuality, I stole money from my parents to buy prostitutes trying to convince myself I was straight,” he said in 2012. “I just didn’t know … I thought my birth parents gave me away because they knew I would be evil and I thought the Reagans would give me back if they found out.”
He briefly attended Arizona State University and Los Angeles Valley College, and attempted to follow his parents into acting, but ultimately became better known for the radio shows he hosted, starting in the late 1980s in Los Angeles, where he briefly rubbed elbows with conservative talk show star Rush Limbaugh. Mr. Reagan attributed Trump’s rise to his ability to cater to the millions who tuned into conservative radio talk shows.
Mr. Reagan became a frequent presence on television, radio and print as a political commentator, working as an analyst for the right-wing news outlet Newsmax during his final days.
Although Mr. Reagan repeatedly expressed dismay over Trump’s haphazard style of politics earlier in Trump’s political career, Mr. Reagan’s opinions appeared to veer increasingly closer to those of Trump.
Mr. Reagan initially denounced the events at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, calling them “wrong” and saying that they had “soiled [Trump’s] legacy forever.” But a year later, he was describing those arrested for allegedly participating in the events that day as “political prisoners.”
In 2024, he wrote a column titled “Democrats: The Enemy of Democracy.”
“While our streets and campuses are crawling with [left-wing protesters] and pro-Palestine vandals, Democrats are still yammering about the ‘insurrection’ of Jan. 6 and worrying about the existential threat Donald Trump supposedly poses to our democracy,” he said.
That year, Mr. Reagan welcomed Trump’s reelection, praising the president for building a broad coalition that included “blue-collar workers, blacks and Latinos” — those who have not traditionally voted Republican.
“With his historic political comeback and his MAGA movement, Trump has created the Republican Party of the future,” Mr. Reagan wrote in November 2024.
In his private life, Mr. Reagan cherished his relationship with his wife, Colleen, whom he married in 1975 after a short marriage to Pamela Putnam that ended in 1972. Mr. Reagan has publicly thanked his wife for persuading him to turn to religion. Survivors include his wife and two children.
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