Former President Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, on Tuesday condemned Republicans in a blunt op-ed for exalting her father as an icon while failing to stand up to President Trump.
“You have claimed [my father’s] legacy, exalted him as an icon of conservatism and used the quotes of his that serve your purpose at any given moment,” Davis wrote in an open letter to the Republican Party published by The Washington Post.
“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.”
{mosads}Davis, an author and former actress, went on to denounce GOP lawmakers for staying quiet when Trump praised leaders such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin. She also slammed Republicans for failing to speak out when Trump “speaks of immigrants as if they are trash.”
“Perhaps you’ve forgotten that my father said America was home ‘for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness,'” she wrote in the piece, which was titled, “Dear Republicans: Stop using my father, Ronald Reagan, to justify your silence on Trump.”
Davis later asks if Republicans are afraid of the president, stating that she can’t “quite understand what’s frightening about 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 continues. “Get over it.”
She concludes the letter by warning that America “will not survive” as the Founding Fathers envisioned if Trump is re-elected.
“So, to the Republican 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,” she writes. “But don’t use my father’s name on the way down.”
Davis has repeatedly criticized Trump and the GOP over the last two years. She told Yahoo News in March that her father would be “horrified” and “heartbroken” by Trump’s presidency.
She also said in a separate Washington Post op-ed that Reagan would be “appalled and horrified” by Congress’s refusal to stand up to Trump.