“It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation,” Will Rogers once said, “but you can lose it in a minute.”

This certainly seems to be the case with former President Ronald Reagan, who served as California’s governor from 1967 to 1975. Just a few awful seconds of a 1971 conversation, secretly recorded by then-President Richard Nixon, is all it has taken to indisputably recast Reagan as an unabashed racist.

In the shocking conversation, first revealed by The Atlantic, Reagan refers to African delegates to the United Nations as “monkeys” and says “they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes.” Nixon guffaws.

The two men — one a governor of California, one a president from California — were upset that the African delegates had voted to recognize the People’s Republic of China. So, in response to this political disagreement, two of the most powerful men in the world resorted to racist invective. Nixon, recounting his conversation with Reagan to a White House staffer, referred to the African delegates as “cannibals.”

President Donald Trump’s increasingly racist rhetoric has stunned political observers, yet he’s simply playing to a constituency that was cultivated over decades by people like Nixon and Reagan. They may have operated on a more subtle level, saving the worst of their bigotry for private conversations instead of declaring it in tweets. Yet the core principle remains the same: racism.

While some political observers wish to cast Trump as an anomaly of history, the truth is that he’s a logical heir to the bigoted lineage of his predecessors. In 1964, the Republican Party began using the “southern strategy,” a ploy to win over white voters in the south by stoking racial anxiety. In 1969, President Nixon launched the drug war as a way to lock up black people, according to one of his top aides.

Reagan’s critics have long pointed out both the implicit and explicit racism in his statements and policies. Yes, Reagan’s racism was there all along, in plain sight, for everyone to see. Yet, for decades, it was also easy for him to get away with it. Not anymore. Times have changed, and the taped conversation with Nixon lays bare Reagan’s unadulterated racism.

Reagan died in 2004 and can no longer atone or apologize. Unfortunately, the National Archives hid the tape for decades in order to protect Reagan’s privacy, allowing him to evade any reckoning. But it’s never too late to set the record straight.

— The Sacramento Bee