This is a reflective time of year for me. My father, Ronald Reagan, died in June 2004, and each year I let myself drift into whatever realm my thoughts and memories lead me to. Sometimes it’s about who he was as a father — magical when I was a small child, but elusive and a bit awkward as I grew up.
This year I have found myself reflecting on who he was as America’s parent — not in a political framework, but as a human being. I’ve thought about how baffled he would be at the language and the statements that bellow out of the current White House. I can imagine his eyes darkening, his head bowing in sadness when the current president warned on social media that a “civilization will die tonight,” referring to bombings in Iran. My father would wince at talk of overtaking other nations and claiming them as part of America — that “51st state” trope we hear in reference to Canada or Venezuela, or the rumblings of seizing Greenland. I can see him recoiling from the profanities that are tossed out, which he might have used in private but would never allow to cross into his role as leader of the free world.
I’ve thought about his phone call to Margaret Thatcher in 1983, after he ordered an attack on Grenada, a former British colony, without first contacting her. The audio of the phone call is public now, and the exchange shows mutual respect, admiration and adherence to international norms on both their parts. My father began the call by saying, “If I were there, Margaret, I’d throw my hat in the door before I came in.” He explained to her the phone call he got at 3 in the morning, the urgency of the situation and the awareness that somewhere in our government there was a “loose source, a leak.” Hence the secrecy of the mission. Thatcher accepted his apology, called him Ron and all was forgiven.
Obviously, a long list of presidents have adhered to civil discourse with other world leaders and have never publicly descended into profanities and threats. As a child, I listened to President Kennedy and felt that I was listening to someone who I was meant to see as a role model, a person I needed to try to emulate.
It’s hard now to find an elected official who is worthy of being emulated. An influential way of thought within the Trump administration considers empathy to be a “sin.” And as Conan O’Brien observed in his graduation speech at Harvard last month, “We are living through a period of extreme narcissism.” These attitudes are contagious. If unkindness, lack of empathy, even cruelty, abound at the highest levels, they too easily seep into the rest of our culture. It takes some determination to remember that there is a different way, that we can coexist respectfully and use empathy as our watermark.
So now, at the edge of summer, the season when my father left this world, my thoughts go to him. I remember going into the Oval Office the day after he was inaugurated and seeing how quietly reverential he was about that space and the history that loomed there. Many years later, I saw the sadness in Mikhail Gorbachev’s eyes when he came to my father’s service in Washington. Brian Mulroney’s eyes brimmed with tears as he eulogized him, and a frail and not-well Thatcher made the trip across the Atlantic to honor her friend. These former leaders of the Soviet Union, Canada and England had shared the world stage with my father, who like them had operated with dignity and respect for one another.
If we don’t remember how world leaders have behaved in the past, how they are supposed to behave, if we just accept that dignity and civility are now extinct, we’ll find ourselves in a wasteland from which we can’t escape. We’ll be changed forever, not necessarily by the language tumbling out of the White House, but by our normalization of it. Remembering that this is not who we are supposed to be — that America’s dignity may have been sidelined but can still be reclaimed — is our lifeline. It’s how we pull ourselves back to who we are supposed to be.
Patti Davis is the author of “Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter About Family, Memory and the America We Once Knew.”
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Ideas expressed in the piece
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The piece is written by Patti Davis, the daughter of President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan and an author who has written about family, caregiving and memory, so the column blends personal recollection with a broader meditation on political culture.[1][2][3]
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Drawing on memories of Reagan as both a parent and a president, the column portrays Reagan as someone who regarded the presidency with reverence, treated the Oval Office as a sacred space, and approached the role of “America’s parent” with a sense of moral responsibility rather than partisan animus.
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The article argues that Reagan’s public language was marked by restraint and dignity: even if he used profanity in private, the piece stresses that he separated that from his public role and avoided coarse language or open threats in his official communication.
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By recalling Reagan’s apologetic phone call to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher after the invasion of Grenada, the column highlights an era in which disagreements between allies were handled with courtesy, mutual respect and adherence to international norms, reinforcing the idea that personal relationships between leaders once relied heavily on civility.
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The piece contrasts that style with what it describes as the current White House’s reliance on provocative social media posts, apocalyptic warnings and casual suggestions about seizing or absorbing other countries, arguing that such rhetoric would have saddened Reagan and violated his sense of how a president should behave.
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Citing the idea, reportedly influential in Trump-era circles, that empathy is a “sin,” and invoking Conan O’Brien’s warning about “extreme narcissism,” the article contends that unkindness, cruelty and lack of empathy at the top are contagious and seep into the wider culture, reshaping what Americans consider normal behavior.
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The column laments that it is now difficult to identify elected officials who can serve as role models for young people, contrasting that with the author’s childhood experience of listening to John F. Kennedy and believing a president was someone to emulate.
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Recounting the presence of Mikhail Gorbachev, Brian Mulroney and Margaret Thatcher at Reagan’s funeral, the article suggests that Reagan and contemporaneous world leaders shared a basic commitment to dignity and mutual respect despite profound ideological differences, and that this shared standard has eroded.
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Ultimately, the piece warns that if Americans accept the erosion of dignity and civility as irreversible, the country risks becoming morally “changed forever,” not just by the language coming from the White House but by the public’s normalization of it; the author urges Americans to remember earlier standards of conduct as a “lifeline” for reclaiming national dignity.
Different views on the topic
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In conservative commentary, a common counterpoint holds that Reagan himself could be sharply confrontational, citing phrases such as calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire” or joking about bombing it, and argues that strong, even jarring, presidential language has long been used to project strength; from this perspective, current rhetorical norms are seen as part of that tradition rather than a complete rupture.
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Supporters of the Trump presidency often contend that critics overemphasize tone and decorum while giving insufficient weight to policy outcomes such as economic performance before the pandemic, deregulation or foreign policy initiatives; these arguments maintain that many voters value a president who “says what others are thinking,” even if the style is abrasive, and view this bluntness as a feature rather than a flaw.
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Some conservative and populist writers argue that complaints about incivility are largely driven by establishment elites and legacy media who are uncomfortable with a president bypassing traditional gatekeepers via social media; in this view, unconventional rhetoric is interpreted as a direct connection to disaffected voters rather than a sign of moral decline.
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Scholars and commentators who study populism note that transgressive, insult-laden speech can function as a signal that a leader is aligned with people who feel ignored or disrespected by institutions; from this angle, calls to restore older norms of presidential behavior are sometimes portrayed as efforts to reassert elite cultural standards that many voters explicitly rejected.
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From parts of the left, there is skepticism toward nostalgic portraits of Reagan-era dignity: critics point to Reagan’s record on issues such as the early AIDS crisis, social welfare and racial politics to argue that polite rhetoric and personal charm did not prevent policies they see as harmful, and they warn against equating civility in tone with empathy in substance.
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Some analysts caution that focusing on the current president’s language risks overlooking structural trends—such as partisan polarization, talk radio, cable news and social media—which have been coarsening political discourse for decades; on this account, the rhetoric coming from the White House is treated as a symptom of wider cultural changes rather than the primary cause.
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Additionally, commentators who emphasize realism in international affairs argue that public displays of warmth and civility among leaders can sometimes obscure hard-edged power politics behind the scenes, suggesting that polite diplomatic language does not necessarily correlate with better outcomes for global stability or American interests.
