I’d say even Reagan already was a very weird president. Before the Watergate affair with Nixon, trust in American presidents was generally high in non-socialist Europe, though imho they went radically overboard with their anticommunism, conflating anarchism and all liberationist movements with what they saw as red fascism.

After Reagan, the surface may have seemed similar, but beneath in the cogs of the American system, something started breaking the labourers of which we see the effects even now. Reagan instigated a new level of arguments for abolishing the state anywhere, such as COINTELPRO, Operation Cyclone, indebting the American labourer while stagnating wages, and so on, and radicalising the discourse step for step.