The daughter of former President Ronald Reagan mentioned the notorious legacy of the Third Reich in an op-ed that tore into President Trump.
Patti Davis, 67, opened her Tuesday Daily Beast article by appealing to the memory of her father, writing, “My father talked a lot about government at home — that it had gotten too big and took too much of people’s money.”
Explaining how her father once bristled at a claim her grade school teacher made that “a benevolent dictator” was “the most perfect form of government,” Davis wrote that Reagan “gave [her] his one-eyebrow-raised look, his mouth turned hard, and he said: ‘That is not true. Dictators are never benevolent, that’s why they’re dictators. They want to control people, hold onto their own power, and not allow people to be free. America has the most perfect government.'”
“I knew a lot about dictators when I was a kid,” Davis said, recalling how she and her family knew a Holocaust survivor. “I asked my father once why the people didn’t turn and trample the soldiers — they outnumbered them by a lot. He told me they were too afraid. When people are frightened, he said, anything can be done to them.”
Davis then segued into the Trump presidency, writing, “Almost on a daily basis now, we hear about how frightened people are of Donald Trump.” She further implied that the Trump supporters in government “fear his wrath and his insatiable appetite for revenge.”
“Those of us who are horrified at the dismantling of our democracy fear him because he may very well be destroying more than we can ever rebuild,” Davis added.
[Related: ‘Traitorous’: Ron Reagan says his father ‘would be ashamed’ of Trump]
Davis joins her brother, 61-year-old Ron Reagan Jr., who also recently blasted the president with graphic, scatological terms in a Daily Beast article last month. “My father would — although he might not use words like this because he was a fairly genteel person — my father would pinch Trump’s empty head off and shit down his flabby neck,” Ron Reagan Jr. wrote.
Ron Reagan Jr. and Davis were Ronald Reagan’s children with Nancy Reagan. He had two other children with his first wife, Jane Wyman. His adopted son, Michael, 74, is an outspoken evangelical Christian who has publicly called his brother “an embarrassment” for claiming their father suffered from Alzheimer’s disease while in office.
Michael described his brother’s Daily Beast interview to the Washington Examiner as “just sad,” adding, “All I can do is pray, as our father did, for Ron.”
