Former President Ronald Reagan was known for the way he brought comfort to an anxious nation. One of the former president’s daughters is challenging Americans to stop turning to President Trump for comfort after national tragedies.
Patti Davis wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that Trump’s actions following a week of political violence show that he “will always be glib and inappropriate” when the country is suffering.
“This president will never offer comfort, compassion or empathy to a grieving nation,” she writes. “It’s not in him. … So I have a wild suggestion: Let’s stop asking him. His words are only salt in our wounds.”
This op-ed comes in the wake of 11 people being killed in a shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, and the arrest of a man who mailed numbers bombs to prominent Democrats.
Trump condemned the acts as “evil,” but Davis writes that “the word doesn’t hold much meaning coming from him.”
“He has also called Democrats, others who oppose him and the news media evil,” she writes.
Davis is a known critic of PresidentTrump. She has called out the president for joking that he nearly canceled an event due to a “bad hair day” after declining to cancel it over the shooting, and for tweeting about the World Series hours after the attack.
“Where does a grieving nation turn for comfort when the man who occupies the White House offers none?” Davis asks.
The actress and author of several novels answers that question by urging her readers to look at the words of past presidents including her father, former President George W. Bush and former President Barack Obama. She writes that all of them “spoke eloquently, with somber compassion and with reverence for the pain of the victims and the shock of a saddened country” after tragedies.
“Our grief was reflected in their eyes,” she writes. “We didn’t doubt that their hearts were breaking along with ours.”
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