As deftly chronicled in Max Boot’s magisterial biography, “Reagan: His Life and Legend,” President Ronald Reagan blazed like a comet across the media and political skies for decades before plunging into obscurity after leaving the White House in 1989.

He is a quaint museum piece since the rise of Donald Trump’s Republican Party and the digital generation.

His landmark 1987 INF treaty with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is dead. The Leviathan state that he pledged to slay endures and grows. The number of pages in the inscrutable Code of Federal Regulations has rocketed past 200,000. Multitrillion-dollar federal deficits have become normalized, rocketing the national debt past $35 trillion and racing toward $50 trillion.

Reagan’s dream of a Strategic Defense Initiative is on life support. His vision of a world without nuclear weapons remains fanciful as China’s nuclear arsenal surges.

His landmark Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 proved to be a Band-Aid to the burgeoning flow of illegal immigration.

Nicaragua’s dictator Daniel Ortega, Reagan’s nemesis during the 1980s and the Iran-Contra scandal, has brutally extinguished all opposition and leagues with Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.

After a brief intermission, the Cold War with Russia turned chillier, most recently over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet empire perversely encouraged the United States to spike national security spending, expand its global military profile aiming at world domination and fight more rather than fewer wars.

Reagan’s pledge to return powers to the states gained no traction. The federal government is to the states as a giant oak is to acorns. President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act is a federal colossus and continues to grow like bamboo.

Reagan’s legacy has largely turned to ashes, as do all great or forceable personalities unadorned by timeless philosophical convictions that live for the ages. Think of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” and the words on King Ozymandias’ pedestal:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Boot highlights how at the peak of Reagan’s amazing ascent, his winsome, debonair personality was disarming to adversaries or enemies and endearing to supporters. He suppressed his ego without depressing his quiet but vaulting ambitions. He lived on the sunny side of life.

Reagan was easy to like and hard to hate. He attracted adoring stares with a tall, handsome, athletic physique that drew eyes wherever he walked. His appearance was what a celebrity should look like.

Reagan was not a thinker. He had no convictions, only chameleon-like opinions largely derived from the likes of Reader’s Digest and Human Events. There is no evidence Reagan ever glanced at Plato’s “The Republic,” Aristotle’s “Politics,” Pericles’ funeral oration, “Plutarch’s Lives,” William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” or “The Federalist Papers.” He never understood, as James Madison explained in Federalist 51, that justice is the end of government, the end of civil society; and, that the glory of the United States has been liberty and the march of the mind, not conquest, world domination or the march of the foot soldier.

This explains Reagan’s common public policy somersaults or contradictions without cognitive dissonance: pleading for balanced budgets while running up record deficits; opposing abortion while appointing Supreme Court justices who reaffirmed abortion as a constitutional right; opposing racial discrimination while courting racists and opposing civil rights laws, including the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986; criticizing communist witch hunts while covertly cooperating with the FBI to identify suspected fellow travelers; exalting family values while fostering a dysfunctional family. Unlike Lillian Hellman, Reagan regularly trimmed his conscience to fit this year’s fashions.

Was Ronald Reagan a great man?

Would he have drunk the hemlock like Socrates to emancipate the mind from hormonal servitude?

Would he like Sir Thomas More have refused to take King Henry VIII’s Oath of Succession and paid the ultimate penalty?

Would he have signed his own death warrant like the 56 signers of the American Declaration of Independence to enshrine the universal, electrifying principles of government by the consent of the governed and unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

While Reagan displayed admirable physical courage on multiple occasions, it is difficult to conceive him of risking that last full measure of devotion for an idea. He lived in a crabbed world of personalities, theater and pedestrian amusements like watching television, riding horses or repairing his ranch.

But Reagan never claimed to be otherwise. He was without pretense. He walked the corridors of power and scaled the commanding heights of fame without losing his modesty, a rare feat in politics.

We should marvel at and imitate Reagan’s admirable traits and ignore the rest as the crooked timber of the species.

He would have wanted it that way.

Bruce Fein (X: @brucefeinesq; www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com) was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.”