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It isn't R/D, it is Red/Blue. Reagan and Bush Sr were hated by the hard left, but not by normie Europeans. The main thing my (utterly conventional European establishment-left) mother remembers about Reagan is how great his speech was after Challenger blew up.
The Red Tribe and Europeans have limited direct contact (Reds don't travel internationally as much as Blues, the only Red media that gets exported is sports, Europeans visiting the US on business are visiting blue cities unless they work in the energy industry, and Europeans visiting the US as tourists are visiting blue cities, natural wonders and Disney). So most of what we learn about the Red Tribe is filtered through (hostile) Blue media, and most of what the Red Tribe know about Europeans is based on social media outrage porn and/or negatively polarising against positive depictions of Europe in Blue media.
The one place where non-Americans have direct visibility of how Reds think is the public behaviour of the man they have chosen to represent them on the world stage since 2016. And from the outside a culture that can enthusiastically elect Donald Trump looks like a culture that considers sadism a virtue and honesty a vice.
It's worth noting it goes both ways; Europe's treatment of its native red tribe does not endear it to American reds, who then find offending the EU elites to be totally acceptable if not good.
Europe doesn't have a "native red tribe". (Some groups that fit the description exist, like Northern Irish Protestants in the UK, who are the ancestors of the American red tribe, but they aren't numerous enough to be an important political force in any European country I am familiar with). The red tribe as discussed by e.g. Scott Siskind isn't just "people with right-populist political views" - it is a distinctive culture within America with its own folkways (including religion) that became uniquely welcoming to right-populist politics because of how the civil rights era went down.
The result of this is that you can predict a white American's politics much more effectively based on tribal markers like hobbies or TV-watching habits than based on conventional demographic data like age or income. This is not the case in Europe where right-populism is the politics of the old (in the UK) or the poor and uneducated (almost everywhere else).
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It's min-maxing. Trump's a boor, but since Reagan, Bush Sr., and certainly Bush Jr. were all treated the same way, that's not a loss. If indeed the Red Tribe Europeans see a difference, it doesn't matter because Blue Tribe Europe has been firmly in charge the whole time.
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