Patti Davis 10/29
Reagan's daughter: Trump lacks compassion
01:46 - Source: CNN
Washington CNN  — 

Former President Ronald Reagan would be “horrified” and “heartbroken” by America’s current state of affairs under President Donald Trump, the late president’s daughter said in a recent interview.

In an interview with Yahoo News that was published Tuesday, Patti Davis sharply criticized the Republican Party and Trump’s presidency, saying the President is endangering American democracy and “assaulting” the Constitution.

“What would you think (Reagan) would think about this moment?” Zainab Salbi, the host of Yahoo News’ “Through Her Eyes,” asked Davis.

“I think he would be horrified,” Davis replied. “I think he would be heartbroken because he loved this country a lot, and he believed in this country. I mean, that was in all of his speeches. And he believed in the goodness of people.”

At another point in the interview, Davis said there are “crickets (from Republicans) when Trump keeps assaulting the Constitution.”

“The Republican Party now – particularly the Republicans in this government – are just sitting by the sidelines and letting the Trump administration destroy this country. I mean they don’t say anything, they don’t stand up to him,” she told Salbi.

Asked by Salbi if Davis was suggesting that Trump is “endangering our democracy,” the former first daughter said she was.

“Of course I am – I mean he is,” she said.

Davis also took aim at Trump’s trademark slogan, “Make America Great Again,” a phrase that was first coined by her father.

“I think it’s taken on, obviously, a completely different meaning because what it seems to mean now is ‘let’s make America white again and racist again and small-minded again,’” she said.

Noting that she’s not a Republican (“I never have been”), Reagan’s daughter also criticized how the GOP operates today, telling Salbi that it “bears no resemblance to the Republican Party of my father’s time.”

This is not the first time Davis has criticized Trump.

In June 2018, she claimed in a Washington Post op-ed that her father would not have backed the President and wrote he would have been concerned with Trump’s freewheeling rhetoric on foreign policy, his constant attacks on the media and his hardline approach to immigration.

And in 2016, Davis cited the attempted assassination of her father in 1981 as evidence that Trump’s suggestion that “Second Amendment people” could do something to prevent Hillary Clinton from appointing judges sympathetic to tougher gun laws have real-world consequences.

CNN’s Eli Watkins and Tom LoBianco contributed to this report.