Reagan ‘would be heartbroken’ over Trump isolating US: Patti Davis

Former President Reagan’s daughter says her father “would be heartbroken” by actions under President Trump that have signaled America’s shift toward isolation from longstanding allies.

“I think he would be grieving,” Patti Davis said during a Tuesday night appearance on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.”

“The America that I grew up in, that we all have known, is one that had alliances and was friends with other countries, and it would go to other countries who were in trouble, who were being tyrannized, or invaded, or, you know, otherwise suffering from famines, for example,” she said.

Trump, since reclaiming the White House in January, has initiated trade wars with countries including Canada, and publicly clashed with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky over support for his country’s war with Russia, which sparked unease among some European leaders.

Davis told CNN anchor Anderson Cooper that her father instilled in her the belief that America is “this force in the world that if another country was in trouble, would cross oceans to help them.”

She reflected on 1985’s “We Are the World,” a song that united the biggest pop stars of the era in support of aid to Africa early in her father’s second term.

“That’s the America that we know, and that we have been bonded with, and suddenly that America is no longer that,” Davis said. “Suddenly we’re hated in the world.”

Davis, who goes by her mother and former first lady Nancy Reagan’s maiden name, has been an outspoken critic of the GOP in the past.

“I disagreed with my father,” she told Cooper. “I protested some of his policies. … This is beyond politics.”

In an opinion piece published in The New York Times over the weekend, Davis wrote that her father told her the night of his 1981 inauguration that he ran for president to “make this world a safer, more peaceful place.”

“When he left and the stillness of Lincoln’s bedroom folded around me, with all of its history and stories, I was struck by the fact that he spoke about the world, not just America,” she wrote.

She added that while she publicly disagreed with Reagan’s policies, she never doubted his intentions.

“I knew he wanted America to be a strong partner in the world, bonding with other countries to defeat tyranny and aggression,” she wrote.

Davis, 72, released her latest memoir, “Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter about Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew,” last month.