Reagan was elected in 1980, around the same time that HIV began spreading and turning into a pandemic. Nearly 60,000 cases were reported with more than 27,000 dead before he even mentioned the disease in a major speech, during his second term.
His administration spent years pushing back on requests for funding for treatment and research. It’s impossible to know for certain, but if the disease had been aggressively studied and treated in the early years it might have been contained to a few hundred or few thousand deaths here in the USA.
Also he cut funds for mental health treatment and facilities, turning disabled people out onto the streets, the War on Drugs was cranked up to inner-city warfare, and the fundamentalist Christian “Moral Majority” that was his power base happily watched queers and black people and sex workers and homeless people die alone and scared.
Until Donald Trump was elected, he was the best example of an oblivious wealthy white person riding a wave of bigotry into the White House, and empowering that bigotry to a degree that cost tens of thousands of lives.
TL;DR, he watched us die and didn’t care.
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