'We have a demagogue in the White House.'
George Clooney has spoken out to slam President Donald Trump and his chief strategist Steve Bannon as ‘Hollywood elitists’.
The Oscar-winning actor and activist was speaking to French TV show Rencontres de Cinema, when he brought up the ‘hypocrisy’ of the President’s response to Meryl Streep’s criticism of him during her Golden Globes speech.
“When Meryl spoke, everyone on that one side said, ‘well that’s elitist Hollywood speaking’,” said Clooney. “Donald Trump has 22 acting credits in television. He collects $120,000 a year in his Screen Actors Guild pension fund. He is a Hollywood elitist.
“Steve Bannon is a failed film writer and director. That’s the truth. Thats what he’s done. He wrote a Shakespearean rap musical about the LA riots that he couldn’t get made…He made a lot of money off of Seinfeld…He’s elitist Hollywood, I mean, thats the reality.”
Clooney continued of he hopes to see the US hold Trump to account and his “feet to the fire” – adding that the American people “do a lot of dumb things over a period of time, but we’re also pretty good at fixing them.”
“We have a demagogue in the White House,” he said. “We need the fourth estate, which is journalists, to hold his feet to the fire. They didn’t do a very good job during the campaign and they haven’t done a particularly good job yet, but those things will change.”
Meryl Streep recently responded to Trump’s claims that she was ‘the most overrated actress‘.
“I am the most ‘overrated’ and most over-decorated and currently — currently — I am the most over-berated actor… of my generation,” she said.
“If you think people got mad when they thought the government was coming after their guns, wait until they come and try to take away our happiness,” Streep warned. “We’re not going to go back to the bad old days of ignorance and oppression and hiding who we are.
She added: “We owe it to the people who have died for our rights, and who have died before they even got their own.”
Last year, Clooney made headlines when he slammed Trump as a ‘xenophobic fascist‘.
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