Ron Reagan

Career In February 1986, Reagan hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live.

Reagan became more politically active after his father left the White House in 1989. In contrast to his father, the younger Reagan's views were unabashedly liberal. In a 2009 Vanity Fair interview, Ron said that he did not speak out politically during his father's term because the press "never cared about my opinions as such, only as they related to him", adding he did not want to create the impression that he and his father were on bad terms because of political differences. In 1991, Reagan hosted The Ron Reagan Show, a syndicated late-night talk show addressing political issues of the day, which was canceled after a brief run since it was unable to compete with the higher ratings of The Arsenio Hall Show, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and Nightline.

He has served on the board of the Creative Coalition, an organization founded in 1989 by a group that included Susan Sarandon and Christopher Reeve, to politically mobilize entertainers and artists, generally for First Amendment rights and causes such as arts advocacy and public education. From February to December 2005, Reagan co-hosted the talk show Connected: Coast to Coast with Monica Crowley on MSNBC.

Until its demise in 2010, Air America Media aired The Ron Reagan Show. The program made its debut on September 8, 2008.

In 2011, he published My Father at 100: A Memoir. In interviews promoting the book, Reagan described noticing his father was having certain mental lapses which, in hindsight, caused the younger Reagan to speculate subsequently that his father may have already been in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease while still in office. The assertion was criticized by many, including his brother, Michael Reagan. Ron Reagan subsequently clarified that he did not feel the lapses were evidence of "dementia."

Political activities Reagan is not a member of a political party, but votes Democratic. In July 2004, Reagan spoke at the Democratic National Convention about his support for lifting Bush's restrictions on federally funded embryonic stem cell research, from which he expected a cure or new treatments for Alzheimer's disease, of which his father had recently died. "There are those who would stand in the way of this remarkable future, who would deny the federal funding so crucial to basic research. A few of these folks, needless to say, are just grinding a political axe and they should be ashamed of themselves," Ron Reagan said of the restrictions. "We can choose between the future and the past, between reason and ignorance, between true compassion and mere ideology." Reagan's mother Nancy also supported this position.

In September 2004, he told the Sunday Herald newspaper that the George W. Bush Administration had "cheated to get into the White House. It's not something Americans ever want to think about their government. My sense of these people is that they don't have any respect for the public at large. They have a revolutionary mindset. I think they feel that anything they can do to prevail — lie, cheat, whatever — is justified by their revolutionary aims" and that he feared Bush was "hijacking" his father's reputation.

Reagan later wrote the essay "The Case Against George W. Bush by Ron Reagan" for Esquire. He voted for Democratic candidate John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. Reagan endorsed Senator Barack Obama of Illinois for president in the 2008 presidential election. In November 2015, Reagan endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party nomination in the 2016 Democratic Party primaries.

In early 2020, Reagan stated his father would have opposed Donald Trump, remarking to The Daily Beast that "The Republican Party at this point, for a whole host of reasons to do with Donald Trump, is an entirely illegitimate political party just made up of a bunch of sycophantic traitors mouthing Kremlin propaganda to defend this squalid little man who is occupying the White House," Reagan said. "This is a dying party. They either have to remake themselves entirely or they will disappear eventually. Within a decade the Republican Party will be a minor fringe group if it continues going this way. My father would have been ashamed of this Republican Party. He would have been embarrassed and ashamed that a president of the United States was as incompetent and traitorous as the man occupying the White House now. He’s a disgrace to the office of the presidency."

Personal life

Reagan lives in Seattle. He married Federica Basagni in 2018.

Religious views

Reagan stated in a 2004 New York Times interview that he did not claim any religion, but that his sympathies were with Buddhism and his wife was a Buddhist. In a June 23, 2004, interview on CNN show Larry King Live, while discussing reasons why he declined to run for political office, Ron Reagan stated "I'm an atheist [...] I can't be elected to anything because polls all say that people won't elect an atheist."

In February 2010, he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers. In May 2014, Reagan appeared in an advertisement for broadcast on Comedy Central for the Freedom From Religion Foundation in which he declared himself "an unabashed atheist" who is "not afraid of burning in Hell." The ad received renewed attention in October 2019 when it aired on CNN during the fourth 2020 Democratic Presidential Debate. The ad was also run during the CNN Democratic debates in January and March 2020.