As the June 5 anniversary of her father’s death draws near, daughter of former President Ronald Reagan Patti Davis reflected on how he would feel about the current state of American politics in a Sunday Washington Post piece.
“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. “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. And in a time of increased tensions in the world, playing verbal Russian roulette is not leadership, it’s madness.”
She said that though her father did not always like the press, he never would have tolerated the current sustained attacks on it from government leaders. She added that he would have felt strongly that cruelty is not a substitution for immigration policy.
She concluded with a quote from her father’s famous 1964 address, “A Time for Choosing.” “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.”
