Former President Ronald Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, knows what a dictator is, and Donald Trump is most definitely a dictator—not a president.
In a searing op-ed for The Daily Beast, Davis takes a direct shot at Trump just with the title of the piece: “Presidents Didn’t Use To Be Dictators”.
As Trump continues his retribution campaign against impeachment witnesses and interferes with Justice Department matters, it’s more clear than ever before that Trump has no respect for the Constitution and is abusing the office he holds. He also aspires to stay in power forever and has referred to himself as a “king”.
Patti Davis recounted a conversation with her father in which he told her about dictators.
“Dictators are never benevolent, that’s why they’re dictators,” he said. “They want to control people, hold onto their own power, and not allow people to be free. America has the most perfect government.”
Apparently, Reagan was wrong about America having a “perfect government,” and his own party has proved it.
Patti Davis then spoke about how leaders are able to become dictators.
“I knew a lot about dictators when I was a kid,” she wrote. “My parents had a friend who had numbers tattooed on her arm. She was at our home often, and I knew the story about how she was put into a concentration camp with her family when she was a child, and only she and her mother survived. I had seen photographs of Nazi soldiers herding Jewish people into cattle cars. 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.”
Trump is not only putting kids in cages, members of his own party are so scared of him that they won’t do what’s right and remove him from office.
“Almost on a daily basis now, we hear about how frightened people are of Donald Trump—Republican Senators, people working in the White House in various capacities, apparently many in the Department of Justice,” she continued. “They 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.”
Only Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) displayed the courage to stand up to Trump when he voted to convict, joining Democrats to make the vote bipartisan.
And we know that federal prosecutors are now reluctant to take on cases involving Trump and his associates out of fear that he will target them in his thirst for revenge, especially since Senate Republicans are willing to let him get away with doing anything he wants.
“We run the risk, it seems to me, of forgetting what the presidency is supposed to be,” Davis concluded. “We are so bombarded with the crudeness of Donald Trump, his cruelty and wanton disregard for the tenets of our Constitution, that the image of a president who has a moral compass, reveres our democracy and follows its laws is fading from our collective psyche,” she added, before warning, “We will never save this democracy until we remember what it feels like to have as our president someone who puts democracy above personal, selfish interests. We need to remember who a president is supposed to be, and we do that by remembering who we are supposed to be.”
Tell that to Trump supporters, who are all too giddy about the idea of Trump being in power for life. Had Ronald Reagan known what his beloved Republican Party would become, he would have destroyed it rather than allow the “city on a hill” to die at the hands of a buffoon.
Featured Image: Wikimedia
