Back in 1980, U.S. Rep. John Anderson (R–Illinois) decided to run for president as an independent. The motto of his campaign was “The Anderson Difference.”

One night that year, NBC-TV ran a story on its Nightly News, “The Anderson Differences,” comparing his positions as a congressman — for instance, favoring a measure to make the U.S. officially a Christian nation — with his positions as a presidential candidate. The comparison was not favorable, not because NBC agreed or disagreed with his past or present positions, but because the difference between past and present was essentially 180 degrees.

That came to mind reading Jim Geraghty:

You may have gathered that I remain a skeptic about Donald Trump. Trump fans look at us skeptics with incredulity that we could possibly object to their man, and his ability to “change the debate” and force the media to discuss topics like sanctuary cities. Those of us not so enamored with Trump pause at how that quality suddenly outranks all other qualities in a potential Republican presidential candidate — including consistent conservatism.

Permit me to remind you about Donald Trump’s assessment of President Bush back in 2008:

Bush has been so bad, maybe the worst president in the history of this country. He has been so incompetent, so bad, so evil, that I don’t think any Republican could have won.

Evil? Evil? Of course, in the same interview, Trump endorsed … diplomatic outreach with Iran.

You know, you can be enemies with people, whether it’s Iran, Iraq, anyplace else and you can still have dialogue. These people won’t even talk to him. It’s terrible.

Wait, there’s more! Check out his assessment of Obama!

VAN SUSTEREN: The new president-elect, what are your thoughts? Pretty exciting, it’s always exciting when we have a change of power, a transition, but what are your thoughts.

TRUMP: It’s very exciting we have a new president. It would have been nice if he ended with a 500 point up instead of down. It’s certainly very exciting.

His speech was great last night. I thought it was inspiring in every way. And, hopefully he’s going to do a great job. But the way I look at it, he cannot do worse than Bush. [Emphasis added.]

VAN SUSTEREN: We know how you feel about this.

TRUMP: It’s not me, it’s everybody. It’s been a total catastrophe. That’s what happened to Republicans. They got run are [sic] out of office because we have a president that’s been so bad.

And he’s been a catastrophe, there’s no question about it. He got us into a war we didn’t need. You look at the money, we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a war, and then people wonder why the economy isn’t doing well.

OPEC is ripping us off left and right, the oil countries are just ripping us off left and right.

So you have wars, you have OPEC, all of this stuff. He didn’t do anything about it. He sends Condoleezza Rice. She gets off a plane and waves to everybody and then leaves. It’s ridiculous. …

And then here’s his thoughts on health care back in 1999 …

TRUMP: I think you have to have it, and, again, I said I’m conservative, generally speaking, I’m conservative, and even very conservative. But I’m quite liberal and getting much more liberal on health care and other things. I really say: What’s the purpose of a country if you’re not going to have defensive [sic] and health care?

If you can’t take care of your sick in the country, forget it, it’s all over. I mean, it’s no good. So I’m very liberal when it comes to health care. I believe in universal health care. I believe in whatever it takes to make people well and better.

KING: So you believe, then, it’s an entitlement of birth?

TRUMP: I think it is. It’s an entitlement to this country, and too bad the world can’t be, you know, in this country. But the fact is, it’s an entitlement to this country if we’re going to have a great country.

And then, as you probably saw, Trump’s post-2012 comments on illegal immigration:

“Republicans didn’t have anything going for them with respect to Latinos and with respect to Asians,” the billionaire developer says.

“The Democrats didn’t have a policy for dealing with illegal immigrants, but what they did have going for them is they weren’t mean-spirited about it,” Trump says. “They didn’t know what the policy was, but what they were is they were kind.”

Romney’s solution of “self deportation” for illegal aliens made no sense and suggested that Republicans do not care about Hispanics in general, Trump says.

“He had a crazy policy of self deportation which was maniacal,” Trump says. “It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote,” Trump notes. “He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”

The GOP has to develop a comprehensive policy “to take care of this incredible problem that we have with respect to immigration, with respect to people wanting to be wonderful productive citizens of this country,” Trump says.

Yet I see people comparing Trump to Reagan. Donald Trump has been a conservative for about ten minutes.

You have read (because I’m sure I quoted it previously) Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation that “Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” (The rest of which is: “… adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”) California Gov. Ronald Reagan raised taxes and signed the nation’s most liberal, for the day, abortion rights legislation, both of which President Ronald Reagan opposed.

But calling a previous president of your own party “evil” seems unlikely to generate much support among your own party, even among those who didn’t like said president. Favoring universal health care, whether ObamaCare or single-payer, is not a position the Republican Party is likely to adopt at any point. At some point he’s going to have to explain the gulf between his previous positions and his current positions.

Trump blamed his first bankruptcy on Reagan’s 1987 tax reform, because it eliminated some obscure real estate tax break. Reagan’s 1987 tax cut helped propel the longest peacetime economic expansion in this nation’s history, which not even Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase could stall for long.

Trump cannot credibly repeat Reagan’s line that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left him, because all of the aforementioned positions remain Democratic positions today as they were in 2008. Either Trump changed all of those positions, which means he needs to explain what changed his mind, or he doesn’t actually have any long-standing firm tenets of what’s right and wrong in politics, other than his own fortunes.

Of course, there’s an easy way to do that if you have enough money, as Trump certainly does. Like Ross Perot in 1992, Trump certainly has enough money to run for president without the support of the GOP, or his apparent former party, the Democratic Party. Run for president as an independent, and you can skip the silliness of the primary parade and go right to the general campaign. You can take whichever positions you want on whichever issues you like, and you can ignore issues you don’t care about or don’t want to touch with a 39 1/2 foot pole. (For instance: Abortion rights.)

To quote 1992 “Reform” Party candidate H. Ross Perot, see? It’s that simple.