Reagan's daughter says he wouldn't want to be in GOP today
Patti Davis, the daughter of former President Reagan, says her late father would be "appalled" by the state of politics today, and she doubts he would want to be associated with the Republican Party.
"I don’t see how he would want to be in it,” Davis told CNN’s Jim Acosta in an interview Sunday. “It’s so diametrically opposed to what he believed and to the dignity that he felt that people in government should have.”
It's not the first time Davis, an actress and author who was estranged from her father for several years but reconciled before his death in 2004, has spoken unfavorably about the modern GOP.
She penned an open letter to Republicans in 2019, arguing they had disparaged her father to pump up former 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. “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.”
During the CNN interview over the weekend, she said she believes her father would be saddened by the state of the nation.
“I think that he would be heartbroken and horrified about where America is and how mired we are in anger, in violence, in disrespect for one another,” she said. “I think he would heartbroken, and I think he would be scared.”