Taking time from promoting her latest book, The Earth Breaks in Colors — which explores the friendship between a white girl and a black girl — Patti Davis spoke with YouTuber Duke Mason about her father, Ronald Reagan, and the legacy of his presidency.
Davis criticized Reagan's glacial response to the HIV epidemic that decimated the gay community during his administration. But Davis had positive things to say about her father's beliefs on immigration.
"I'm not going to make excuses for the failure of his administration to address the AIDS crisis while it was going on," she said. "It was a failure, and it hurts my heart that that happened on so many levels."
Watch the interview below.
Davis claimed that because her father delegated the responsibility of keeping him up-to-date on important matters, those people were able to keep critical information from him. She said relying too much on others was a flaw of Regan's but it didn't absolve him of his responsibility for his actions.
Davis said that she "absolutely hates politics" and sought to write a book without a political perspective. However, that didn't stop Mason from getting her thoughts on the 2016 presidential race.
"How do you think the real Ronald Reagan fits with the Republican party today?" Mason asked.
"Well, I think what we've seen with this political campaign is facts don't matter," Davis said. "My father supported immigration. He would not, he certainly would not be saying, you know, 'Muslims should register' and 'Let's shut the door'...He wouldn't be saying 'Let's build a huge wall and have Mexico pay for it' or 'Send them all back. Send millions of people back.' In fact he did quite the opposite."
"They invoke his name but they bypass who he was and what he did," she concluded.