Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan’s daughter, the notorious “rebellious First Daughter” who posed for Playboy twice, has issued a blistering rebuke of the GOP at The Washington Post for going along with President Donald Trump’s agenda.
“Dear Republicans: Stop using my father, Ronald Reagan, to justify your silence on Trump,” was the article’s headline as it went on to blast the GOP for holding up her father as “an icon of conservatism” while using “the quotes of his that serve your purpose at any given moment.”
“Yet at this moment in America’s history when the democracy to which my father pledged himself and the Constitution that he swore to uphold, and did faithfully uphold, are being degraded and chipped away at by a sneering, irreverent man who traffics in bullying and dishonesty, you stay silent,” Davis said in the article, as the HuffPost reported.
The Hill reported that Davis then reminded the GOP that Reagan stated that America was a home for everyone. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten that my father Reagan said America was home ‘for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness,'” she wrote before questioning why Republicans are afraid of President Trump, whom she describes as “an overgrown child who resorts to name-calling.”
“But if that is the case, then my response is: You are grown men and women,” she wrote. “Get over it.”
Davis went on to accuse the President of speaking of immigrants as trash, citing the time Trump’s administration separated migrant children from their parents at the border with Mexico, omitting that the Obama administration kept children in cages as a “deterrent.”
“You stay silent when President Trump speaks of immigrants as if they are trash, rips children from the arms of their parents and puts them in cages,” Davis continued, advising the GOP to become a party that “holds tightly to my father’s legacy.”
“If you are going to stand silent as America is dismantled and dismembered, as democracy is thrown onto the ash heap of yesterday, shame on you,” concluded Davis. “But don’t use my father’s name on the way down.”
Patti Davis has criticized President Trump many times throughout his presidency, often using her father as a counter-example. Last year, she went as far to say that former President Ronald Reagan would not even recognize Donald Trump’s America.
“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,” she wrote at the time.
“He would plead with Americans to recognize that the caustic, destructive language emanating from our current president is sullying the dream that America once was,” she added. “And in a time of increased tensions in the world, playing verbal Russian roulette is not leadership, it’s madness.”