The daughter of former US President Ronald Reagan has lashed out at President Donald Trump for what she describes as a disregard for the country’s democracy and the violation of US constitution.
Patti Davis harshly criticized the incumbent in a Daily Beast column and said "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."
Davis stressed that the United States was running the risk of "forgetting what the presidency is supposed to be, [because] 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 complambass, reveres our democracy and follows its laws is fading from our collective psyche."
Trump "may very well be destroying more than we can ever rebuild," Davis warned, writing that Republican senators, many in the Department of Justice and others who work in the White House, fear Trump's "wrath and his insatiable appetite for revenge."
Reagan’s daughter also made an analogy between the leadership of her father's administration and the current one, saying, "We need to remember who a president is supposed to be, and we do that by remembering who we are supposed to be."
Reagan was California governor from 1967 to 1975, and US president between 1981 and 1989. He died in 2004.
The former president helped end the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the US and established the architecture of nuclear arms control in a series of high-profile meetings with then-Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Since taking office in 2016, Trump has time and again been under fire for his radical views on a raft of issues, including racism in his treatment of Muslims and other religious minority groups in the US, mishandling of the migrant crisis, and his pressure on Ukraine to probe a 2020 presidential rival, among many other cases.
Over the past weeks, Trump has been harshly lambasted for failing to take appropriate measures to contain the new coronavirus as the flu-like pathogen continues to take its toll across the US.
The number of US coronavirus infections climbed above 82,000 on Thursday, surpassing the national tallies of China and Italy, as New York, New Orleans and other hot spots faced a surge in hospitalizations and looming shortages of supplies, staff and sick beds.
Despite a surge in the number of infections across the US, Trump announced on Monday that he planned to lift restrictions on public activities which were implemented to control the deadly virus before the middle of April.
The novel coronavirus, a respiratory disuse known as the COVID-19, emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December, incrementally infecting some 185 countries across the world.
More than 533,000 people worldwide have so far been infected with the virus and over 24,000 have died, according to a running count by worldometers.info.