The daughter of former president Ronald Reagan chastised Donald Trump for his “glib” suggestion that “Second Amendment people” could stop Hillary Clinton from appointing Supreme Court justices as president.
“I am the daughter of a man who was shot by someone who got his inspiration from a movie, someone who believed if he killed the President the actress from that movie would notice him,” Patti Davis wrote in a Wednesday Facebook post, referring to the 1981 assassination attempt on Reagan by John Hinckley Jr.
“Your glib and horrifying comment about ‘Second Amendment people’ was heard around the world,” she continued.
Trump and his staffers have insisted that he never meant to encourage violence and meant that gun-owning voters should defeat Clinton at the polls. Davis and others have pointed out that the vagueness of his remark left it open to interpretation, and said that a presidential candidate is responsible for the way people read his words.
“It was heard by your supporters, many of whom gleefully and angrily yell, ‘Lock her up!’ at your rallies,” Davis wrote. “It was heard by the person sitting alone in a room, locked in his own dark fantasies, who sees unbridled violence as a way to make his mark in the world, and is just looking for ideas. Yes, Mr. Trump, words matter.”
A few months into Reagan’s first term in the White House, Hinckley shot the Republican president in the chest on a Washington D.C. street, puncturing his lung. He was inspired by the film “Taxi Driver,” in which Robert De Niro plotted to assassinate a presidential candidate, and hoped to draw the attention of actress Jodie Foster after becoming infatuated with her character in the movie.
In July, a federal judge ordered that Hinckley be released from the psychiatric hospital where he has been held for decades.
Read Davis’ full post below.
