While they’ve never been successful in actually democratizing a foreign country, neoconservatives have had one major success: convincing the mainstream that Ronald Reagan agreed with them on foreign policy.

On Wednesday, POLITICO continued this myth by declaring that in choosing the “Ukraine skeptic” Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his running mate, Donald Trump was accelerating “his party’s rejection of its Reaganite roots.”

“Former President Donald Trump didn’t just select a running mate here—he doused political kerosene on the raging Republican fire over foreign policy,” POLITICO claimed.

“By tapping the 39-year-old Sen. J.D. Vance, one of the party’s leading national security doves, Trump strengthened the hand of the isolationist forces eager to undo the hawkish GOP consensus that has endured since the Reagan era.”

It is true that the neoconservative vision of foreign policy long endured since the Reagan era and had roots in his administration.

It is also true that so many Republican hawks actually hated Reagan for his most important foreign policy achievement and greatest legacy: diplomacy with Russia.

Something Donald Trump now says he will do by reaching out to Vladimir Putin regarding the Ukraine conflict, just as Reagan did with Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev over nuclear proliferation.

For the record, J.D. Vance has also said that negotiating with Russia—as Reagan did—is the best path forward.

So how are Vance or Trump a rejection of the GOP’s “Reaganite roots?”

It depends on whether we’re talking about the real Reagan or not.

Newt Gingrich called Reagan’s meeting with Gorbachev in 1985 “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”

Ah yes, Munich. Any attempt at diplomacy is always that, to them. When Trump shook hands with Putin in 2018, the Denver Post’s David Goldfischer wailed, “It is now worth comparing Trump’s post-Helsinki celebration of closer relations with Russia, to the similar stance taken by Neville Chamberlain after his 1938 discussions with Adolf Hitler at Munich.”

As early as 1982, Norman Podhoretz described the “Neo-Conservative Anguish” over Reagan’s foreign policy in the New York Times and claimed the president had “shamed himself and the country” with his “craven eagerness” to give away America’s nuclear advantage.

How have hawks been allowed to commandeer Reagan?

This rewriting of the 40th president and his foreign policy record seems to have begun in earnest 28 years ago, when Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan penned “Toward a Reaganite Foreign Policy,” trying to push for a U.S. war with Iraq during the Clinton era that George W. Bush would later deliver.

Judging by his record, Reagan would have not made Bush’s Iraq mistake.

As The American Conservative co-founder Patrick Buchanan said about his old boss in 2004 after Reagan’s death, “Would Ronald Reagan have invaded Iraq? Would he have declared a doctrine of preventive war to keep any rival nation from rising to where it might challenge us? Would he have crusaded for ‘world democratic revolution’?”

“Was Reagan the first neoconservative?” Buchanan asked.

“This claim has been entered in the wake of his death,” he continued. “Yet, it seems bogus, a patent forgery, a fabricated claim to the Reagan legacy, worked up in the same shop where they made the documents proving Saddam was buying up all the yellowcake in Niger.”

David Keene, former American Conservative Union chair and former president of the National Rifle Association, also defended Reagan’s legacy from neocons eager to claim him.

“Reagan resorted to military force far less often than many of those who came before him or who have since occupied the Oval Office,” Keene said. “After the [1983] assault on the Marine barracks in Lebanon, it was questioning the wisdom of U.S. involvement that led Reagan to withdraw our troops rather than dig in. He found no good strategic reason to give our regional enemies inviting U.S. targets.”

“Can one imagine one of today’s neoconservative absolutists backing away from any fight anywhere?” Keene asked.

No, I can’t. They would never.

Ronald Reagan would and did. But I have no doubt this glaring fact won’t prevent mainstream news sources from lazily allowing neoconservatives to hijack his name as they have now for almost 30 years.