Ronald Reagan’s daughter has criticised the White House for giving “sketchy details and evasive answers” about Donald Trump’s condition.
Patti Davis made the accusations as she recalled her own experience after her father was shot and hospitalised in March 1981.
“When you're president, privacy is not an option, including, and maybe especially, privacy about your health,” wrote Ms Davis in the Washington Post.
“That's a lesson my father's administration understood, and that Donald Trump and his advisers still need to learn.”
Ms Davis contrasted the aftermath of the shooting of her father and his press secretary James Brady with Mr Trump’s battle with Covid-19.
And while she says father’s White House had made mistakes they tried to be honest about Mr Reagan’s condition.
“What is important is that White House officials acknowledged and honoured the fact that the American people deserved to be informed about what was happening to their president,” she wrote.
Ms Davis claimed was not the case with Mr Trump’s hospitalisation over the weekend after his positive test for coronavirus.
“Now the country is confronted with a president suffering from a potentially deadly virus. Instead of accurate and complete information, Americans are receiving only sketchy details and evasive answers,” she wrote.
““It's a common medical practice that you want to convey confidence," White House communications director Alyssa Farah told Fox News on Sunday.
“This fundamentally misunderstands the challenge and the role of medical briefings: It is not to reassure either the patient or the American people, it is to provide them with clear and reliable information.
“Regardless of what any of us think of the man holding the highest office in the land, his health, his fitness, his ability to be present and accounted for, has everything to do with our safety as a nation.
“It has to do with our trust in the government. And that trust is being eroded - at the worst possible time.”
