On Friday's CNN Tonight, host Don Lemon hyped a Washington Post op ed by liberal author Patti Davis -- the daughter of former President Ronald Reagan -- and gave her a forum to compare the Trump administration to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.
Not mentioned by the CNN host is that it is hardly surprising that Davis would be critical of a right-leaning President since she has a long history of being a liberal activist who was critical of her parents.
Before a commercial break at 10:29 p.m. Eastern, Lemon teased:
When we come back, blunt words for President Trump from the daughter of another President. Quote, "My father would never have stood for this." That's from Ronald Reagan's daughter, Patti Davis. She's going to join me about how she is taking a stand against President Trump right after this break.
After returning from break, Lemon began by recalling that former President Jimmy Carter made recent comments critical of President Trump, and the CNN host then added:
Tonight, we're learning what another President might have thought, and that's Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan's daughter, Patti Davis, has an opinion piece in the Washington Post titled, "My Father, Ronald Reagan, Would Never Have Stood for This."
Leaving less informed audience members to assume Davis had political views similar to her conservative father, Lemon posed:
You just heard what President Carter -- his comments about President Trump. Former Presidents don't often speak out about the current one, the sitting President. But President Trump seems to be testing that practice. What do you think your father would have to say?
After theorizing that President Reagan would be "appalled" and "heartbroken," she then got into the Hitler comparisons a bit later as she added:
They told us what they were going to do in the same way that Nazi Germany -- Hitler told people what they were going to do and assumed that no one was going to get in his way. And Donald Trump has assumed that no one would get in his way, and so far, if you look at the silence of Congress, he's right.
This is not the first time Davis has spoken out since the death of her father and claimed that Reagan would have gone to the left on a political issue as she also did so when same-sex marriage was being debated almost a decade ago.
