Patti Davis is right that her father surely would be appalled by the new Trumpist Republican Party.
While nobody can claim that Ronald Reagan’s surviving daughter speaks for her late father, she has written about him long enough and lovingly enough for her thoughts on his legacy to be taken seriously. A former rebel and noted liberal, she famously reconciled with President Reagan late in his life and admitted she was wrong to oppose him in some major policy areas.
In a half-hour interview this week, Davis said that if Reagan still lived, he “would be horrified. I think he would be heartbroken, because he loved this country a lot and he believed in this country.”
Specifically, she criticized Republicans for their silence — “crickets” — when they see instances when Trump “assaults the Constitution” or “talks like an autocrat. He befriends autocrats. He supports autocrats. He believes them. He wants to be one.”
But her complaints were less policy-specific than they were tonal. While her father was hardly afraid to draw distinctions and criticize opponents, he usually did so in tones as much of sorrow and of anger, and he famously tried to broaden his coalitions far more often than he tried to “divide and conquer.”
Said Davis of Trump’s far different approach: “If you stir up fear in people, you weaken them. If you divide people, you weaken them. Everything he says is divisive.” She said her father, on the other hand, “believed in the goodness of people.”
There is nothing new about these critiques, of course, but they are worth hearing because they come from a daughter who often has written lovingly about her father’s “graciousness, his kindness toward others, his gratitude and his humility. … He tried to reach higher, to understand what God wanted of him.”
It obviously pains her to see conservatives who once thought her father hung the moon now act as if Trump does.
Noted Reagan biographer Craig Shirley, who at times has bristled at Trump’s behavior and Trump’s attempt to grab Reagan’s mantle, still warns against taking Patti Davis’ assessment as gospel.
“I applaud Patti Davis’ loyalty to her father,” he told me, in response to her new interview, “but other Reaganites like Ed Meese and Newt Gingrich disagree with her. We know Ronald Reagan was a party man, supporting liberal Republicans like Sen. Chuck Percy. Reagan also supported Richard Nixon right up until the end and Nixon never governed as a conservative. But Patti is standing on her principles, and for that she should be applauded.”
The best takeaway from Davis’ interview, probably, is to focus less on her criticisms of Trump than on the attributes of her father that she treasured and wishes still were treasured in public life. On those grounds, she is surely correct that we should aspire to Reaganesque personal decency and goodwill.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Hillyer (no known relation) penned once-famous words that, decades later, could well have been applied to Reagan: “In him was a perfection, an unconscious grace/life could not mar, and death cannot efface.”
Let us all hold dearly to those virtues again and to support those who come close to exemplifying them.
