Ronald Reagan would be “pretty horrified at where we’ve come to,” his daughter Patti Davis wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece Monday. With the impending anniversary of Reagan’s death on June 5, Davis, an author, imagined what he would say if he could see the country now. She never mentions President Trump by name, but the column is a clear rebuke of the president.
“He would be appalled and heartbroken at a Congress that refuses to stand up to a president who not only seems ignorant of the Constitution but who also attempts at every turn to dismantle and mock our system of checks and balances,” Davis wrote.
She imagines her father “would plead with Americans to recognize that the caustic, destructive language emanating from our current president is sullying the dream that America once was. And in a time of increased tensions in the world, playing verbal Russian roulette is not leadership, it’s madness.”
Further, Davis says that her father “wouldn’t have tolerated” the president’s relentless attacks on the press as the enemy, even though he also “didn’t always like the press.” She said that Reagan believed that a free press “sets us apart from dictatorships and countries ruled by despots.”
Davis suggests Mr. Trump’s immigration laws are cruel and in closing quotes the finals words of Reagan’s famous “A Time for Choosing” speech in 1964. She thinks he would ask Americans to remember those words: “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”
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