Susan Sarandon Defends Her Political Views, Calls Trump ‘Dangerous’
Susan Sarandon has been a divisive force on the U.S. political scene, even before her presidential hopeful, Bernie Sanders, lost the Democratic nomination in his bid for the White House. She’s been sparring with civilians and celebrities alike — just witness her many Twitter spats with fellow actress Debra Messing. But as she recently told Vulture, her intent isn’t to create separation. She just wants people to wake up.
“Well, I think those people are just at a loss of really examining what happened,” the Feud: Bette and Joan star says of all the vitriol. “And it’s easy to blame me. But I mean, seriously, there’s me and Viggo Mortensen against all the people that supported Hillary. That would mean that we outweighed Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Beyoncé, Jay Z, Katy Perry, Julia Roberts. I mean every single person. Does that make sense to you? You know what I’m saying? I don’t think it’s rational, it’s not based in anything rational. It’s just a way to not deal with reality.”
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Sarandon, 70, goes on to explain she doesn’t understand the hate and feels we need to move on from what happened during the 2016 election. While there are plenty of things she’d like to complain about regarding the primaries, it’s time to put squabbles aside and get the country moving in the right direction.
“We have to be dealing with very, very serious things that are going on, and we play into Trump’s hands by wallowing in this blaming thing instead of actually unifying and doing something about it,” Sarandon explains. “I just saw, today, that he signed something that would put transgender kids at risk in schools. So are we really going to spend the time going after me and not go after the people that we really should?”
Sarandon has also been opposed to the Keystone XL Pipeline, banding together with fellow actors Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, and Shailene Woodley, who famously got arrested while protesting and broadcast the ordeal on Facebook Live. Sarandon points out that Hillary Clinton didn’t have much to say about DAPL when she was campaigning, and she doesn’t seem to have much to say about it now … but Sarandon is heartened, at least, to see people mobilizing and protesting to make their voices heard.
“Now all these people that march and have found themselves to be political, that’s so great, and it’s what they have to do now,” she says. “[Hillary] should be mobilizing her people to deal with all of these affronts to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, all the Democrats that are voting with the Republicans, paying attention to the specifics of what’s happening, and stop wasting our energy on this kind of empty blaming.
“It wasn’t about winning,” she adds. “It’s supposed to be about the issues. And now we have real issues and things that need to be addressed, environmentally and with civil rights. We can’t afford to be wasting our time and energy and taking on a few people and saying, ‘They were the reason.’ I mean, that’s just absurd.”
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Sarandon also addresses the comment she made to MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes when she said Donald Trump could bring on the revolution. Doubling down on her prediction, Sarandon notes that she did indeed feel that was happening: “If you take DAPL, for instance, it got to the river over the last eight years. When you look at what happened with the deportation of people in this country, when you look at our policies in a lot of other areas, when you look at who has been in our government, money has been running our country for a long time, and this is not something new. Now we have a guy who is so clumsy and so obvious that suddenly people are awake, and that’s a very good thing.”
It’s this awareness that has led to a kind of transparency that we’ve never had before, according to Sarandon, and she feels that Sanders’s influence is partially to thank for that. It’s given people “a blueprint of what’s wrong” so that we now recognize what it is we need to fix, not to mention what’s been broken for a long time.
But while Sarandon is looking at the bright side of what Trump’s presidency has wrought, she’s quick to say she’s not defending him (“People seem to want to say that I am,” she says). She’s pretty clear in stating she has no love for him and sees him as being dangerous, but that he’s doing us a favor by exposing “all the cracks that are in our system.”
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“We have to get rid of these cabinet appointees, and we can do it,” Sarandon insists. “And we have to get out and vote during the midterms, which nobody has been doing. You have 45 percent of the country that didn’t vote in the regular election, and in Michigan you have 90,000 people going to the polls and not voting for either person that’s running for president, but voting down ballot. There’s something really wrong.”
So what’s the solution? According to Sarandon, we have to get progressives involved from the bottom up to create change. Citing recent town hall meetings that have been lightning rods for discourse between the government and its people, Sarandon addresses the Democrats’ issue with ignoring too much of the country’s needs and demands, and points out there’s no party that’s truly in support of the working people.
“When you see these town-hall meetings where people are going and holding their representatives responsible and demanding answers — that, to me, is a revolution; you’ve never seen that before,” she says. “That’s a really, really healthy sign. And I have faith in this country. Traveling all around with Bernie made me love this country more and more. There are patriots everywhere who are kind and generous and accepting and inclusive. The heart of America is not what you hear from his mouth at all.”
As for her feud with Messing, Sarandon says she hasn’t spoken with her but “would certainly look forward to any opportunity to say hello.”
Here’s hoping the moment is captured in Twitter infamy.
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