Trump is proposing a comparable strategy. His suggested immigration policy—deport everyone who came to the U.S. illegally, build a wall on the southern border, and make Mexico pay for the wall—has garnered the most attention, but his other ideas follow a similar template. How to deal with ISIS? “You bomb the hell out of them,” then encircle them and take away the oil they control, he told Bill O’Reilly and Anderson Cooper in two separate interviews. “Once you take that oil, they have nothing left. And it’s so simple.” As far as manufacturing jobs going overseas, Trump used a hypothetical example of Ford threatening to build a plant in Mexico and promised he would put a 35 percent tariff on any Ford vehicle brought into the U.S. “It’s that simple,” he told a crowd in New Hampshire. “Believe me.” And on economic competition with China: “When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China, in a trade deal? They kill us. I beat China all the time. All the time.”

Critics have charged that Trump’s message is too simple—that it’s foolish and unrealistic. But he refuses to entertain that possibility. When a Washington Post reporter asked him recently if he had encountered any campaign issue that turned out to be more complex than he initially thought, he wouldn’t take the bait. “This is not complicated, believe me,” Trump maintained. Similarly, in 1980, the Carter camp accused Reagan of having a “terribly simplistic view of the world” and espousing “simple-minded theories.”

Reagan was undeterred. On the stump, he continued to offer straightforward prescriptions for inflation and the oil crisis, the two major economic problems facing U.S. consumers. “Government causes inflation,” Reagan said. “We’ve got to make government make it go away,” by cutting taxes, reducing spending, and deregulating business (this would also reduce unemployment, Reagan argued). When asked about energy, he quipped, “Does it take a genius to figure out that the answer to our having all we need and no more being dependent on OPEC is to turn the energy industry loose to produce all the natural oil and the natural gas that is to be found here?”

The message—that simple solutions exist, but other leaders lack the strong will to implement them—was a central aspect of Reagan’s appeal and is key to understanding the Trump phenomenon. But in the long term it won’t pay off for Trump as it did for Reagan because of two major differences between the 1980 election and the 2016 election: the opposing candidates and the voters’ mood.

Reagan’s message worked beautifully against Jimmy Carter in 1980 because it drew on their differences. Carter’s speeches as president emphasized that there were no simple solutions—restoring America’s confidence and prosperity, he said, would take years of hard work and sacrifice (most memorably, he told people to turn down their thermostats and drive less). It was very refreshing for voters to hear someone saying the opposite. It was also easy for Reagan to paint Carter as weak and vacillating. Carter appeared utterly powerless to resolve the Iran hostage crisis, and his pursuit of Cold War detente had been undermined by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Despite Carter’s distinguished Navy career, even his personal image exuded weakness, as exemplified by the media’s fixation on how a “killer rabbit” had startled him on a 1979 fishing trip.