No, I think he would have accepted the science and understood the need for masks. Again, he would not have been a Trumpist.
Holy shit, that made me wince it was so good.
Really? I thought it was so lame it didn’t deserve a response. I’m talking about character issues like not banging porn stars then lying about it, insulting people in vile ways, lying constantly, bragging about how great you are, etc. Personal character issues. Trump’s behaviour in public would have engendered nothing but scowls and derision from Reagan, who always tried to be a gentleman.
The policies of his government are a different matter on which we can disagree.
It depends though. Alex never had to deal with decades of FOX News and RW media. Plenty of genuinely good people are effectively stupid and/or evil because of the misinformation bubble that many people live under in our society.
The policies of his government is an interesting way to describe numerous crimes he committed on purpose and lied repeatedly about. Iran-Contra isn’t something a good person did. Reagan may have been more cordial than Trump, but he wasn’t much better morally.
And I suspect Reagan would have supported Trump. You know why? Because he believed that cutting taxes was magic. Even when he got proved wrong and had to walk it back.
He would be a pro-trumper at first, tearing the family apart, then there would be a Very Special Episode of Family Ties in which there’s a last straw (tear gassing peaceful protesters for the Bible prop photo op? The bleach injection soliloquy? A combo of several trump trip ups?) that causes Alex to finally see the error of his ways and renounce trumpism. Freeze-frame of the family hugging to canned applause at the end of the episode.
Didn’t his dad turn hard libertarian and start stockpiling guns in the Nevada desert though?
Yeah, but they’re different questions. Reagan, far as anyone can tell, was kind of a boy scout in his personal mores. He was cordial with his ex-wife and very close to his second. He seems to have been a cold parent at times and would willingly lie about secret government policy, but that’s not quite the same thing as bragging about grabbing women by the pussy or clumsily trying to stage a coup.
Reagan was a country-club Republican that would have regarded Trump as a crass vulgarian and ideologically vacuous. As an old Cold War-warrior he sure wouldn’t have appreciated the sucking up to a Putin. Hard to say definitively because he could be pragmatic in his own way, but I can easily see Reagan falling into the never-Trump camp. And I say that as someone who despised Reagan back in the day.
Changed his name, too.
And his wife.
LOL 
I thought you were referring to the musical band instrument.
Alex was a Reagan conservative. There’s no comparison between 1980’s Conservatives and the Populist Trump. Trump has hijacked the Republicans party’s message.
Here’s what Michael J. Fox had to say on the question.
What would be funnier?
There’s your answer.
…while keeping the character relatable as the lead.
But yes, “what’s funnier” would be the key. Of course there is the element of whether post-2016 writers would take the position of “there can NOT be ANYTHING funny or sympathetic about someone supporting ANYTHING about Trump!!!”
I believe you saw the same documentary I did where he and his wife shot up a giant snake-like monster that tunneled into their basement.
The technical term is ‘graboid’.
When I posed the question, I was imagining the teenaged Alex that we saw in the 1980s growing into a man in his fifties here in the 2020s. I hadn’t thought about magically transporting the teenager to the future (wasn’t there a movie about that?) However, I can see how that could be a possibility.
Today, teen Alex would be a Trumpist with liberal parents. I believe we actually saw a fleshing out of that sort of story with the recent revival of Rosanne. The circumstances were quite different, but the conflict in the family dynamic between Trumpy Rosanne and her liberal sister Jackie played on this idea.
I was born in 1967 and was a teen during Family Ties’ original run. However, in doing further research inspired by this thread, I discovered that the real Michael J. Fox was born in 1961, which makes him older than I thought. I thought he was closer to my age. I read somewhere that the Alex character is supposed to have been born in 1965, which means I still missed the mark. Surprisingly, even the real Justine Bateman is older than I, having been born in 1966. I would assume Mallory then was born sometime in 1967 or 68. Tina Yothers comes in in 1973, which is really out of bounds for a character that I ever related to. (By the way, I can’t be the only guy who totally had the hots for Mallory. I drooled over her more than Skippy did.)
So what does it all mean? Alex was a comedic foil for his parents and the other characters. This is a guy who had a Nixon baby-rattle! (By the way, who BOUGHT that for him? I guess Uncle Ned…?) But, Alex had a moral center, even if he wasn’t always as faithful to girlfriends as he might be. I think it is unfair to paint him as a philanderer in the Trump mold when we lose touch with Alex at such a young age. He may well have matured in his relationships with women. The real Michael J. Fox has stayed with Alex’s girlfriend all these years…
But, Alex loved his family. And they loved him. Not just sitcom love; they all had a genuine love and respect for each other (within the context of a TV show; I have no idea if the actual actors cared one whit about each other). They shared opinions and disagreed, but still kept track of what was truly important in their relationships.
Could a family sitcom like Family Ties work today? The ditzy sister and the nerdy sister aren’t too hard, but what about a Trumpist teen and Clintonian parents? Could that situation even have comedy?
I think it would be hard.
Any TV character that was a full on Trump supporter would be difficult to write. If you try to get laughs by simply having the character reflect Trump’s real world actions and views faithfully, it might come across as distinctly unfunny. You would alienate a significant proportion of the voting population, and might be seen as “punching down”. Alternatively, the usual comedy strategy would be to have a character that is an exaggeration or caricature, but – as has been said many times before – it’s almost impossible to parody Trump’s actions and views because they are so ridiculous already.
Then you could try making the character a person going through the very real struggle of moderate conservatives who find themselves alienated by Trump-ism and have nowhere to go but again that is a serious topic and mocking the character might come across as distinctly unfunny and unkind.
I suspect that it might be possible to write a sitcom based on the above, but it would have to be quite an edgy political show, not a mainstream comedy like Family Ties.
It’s possible. My opinion on the matter is certainly the more negative of the two. The reason I am . . . cynical, is that I tend to find that life after college tends to grind away a lot of idealism in the pursuit of success. And Alex is very ambitious, determined to prove himself, and to be aggressively different from his parents. Taking into account his going to work in ‘Greed is Good’ Wall Street of the late 80s, I cannot help but expect the worse.
And no, I didn’t think Alex was Trump-casual or crass with women. But getting himself in trouble and divorcing a few times? That would be the norm for a successful young man in that situation. And that in and of itself could easily sour him.
But you are correct D_G - I am still looking at the worst case scenario for a young man who when last seen had a lot of possibilities. If there is such a thing as ‘heaven’ for past sitcom characters, we can all hope that for his sake he found a way to balance his desire for success with his moral compass. It’s a trial many people in this world have attempted and failed. 
Yes and no (but mostly no). I think few networks would want to try, because they’d risk writing off 30-50% of the possible audience for the reasons @Princhester already laid out very well in the prior post. I don’t think the balancing act could work - certainly not long enough to get people invested in the characters past the inevitable ‘off-tone’ episodes.
The Yes would of course be on Fox. I could absolutely see it played as a sitcom ‘with a smart, hip’ young Republican (with Trump leanings, but probably not full MAGA) played off against bumbling, possibly well-meaning liberal parents. Think Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as a guideline and go from there. I doubt the PTB at Fox would care to try to play it straight with left leaning POV, and they’d invest the ‘Alex’ character with plenty of charm and lots of disarming “just asking questions” and telling people to draw their own conclusions. Which of course, 2-3 episodes down the line would be made explicitly clear to be wrong for the Democratic side.
Although to be honest, at this point it’s stretching the idea of a family sitcom. But many such ensembles tend to end up with 1-2 lead characters and a supporting cast after the first season or two.