George Clooney says Trump family belongs in the 'dustbin of history' following Capitol attack
George Clooney says the entire Trump family belongs in the “dustbin of history” following the U.S. Capitol riots that left five people dead.
The Midnight Sky actor unleashed his remarks during a sneak preview of a Jan. 15 podcast by KCRW’s The Business. "It's devastating to watch the People's House being desecrated in that way,” he told host Kim Masters. “But it is also a tremendous overreach in a way that everybody kept waiting for...what’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back? And it just seemed like that line kept getting moved and moved and moved and outrage just didn’t even matter anymore.”
On Wednesday, after President Trump assured his supporters, “We will never concede” at a Washington D.C. rally to continue defying the results of the Nov. 3 election, a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol where members of Congress and Senate worked to certify Biden’s 306 electoral votes. The crowd forced its way inside, overwhelming law enforcement and destroying property. As a result, five people, including a Capitol police officer, died.
Clooney then cited Trump’s unsuccessful attempt to convince Georgia leaders to find fraudulent votes (of which the state reportedly denied). “Even to the point of calling the Secretary of State in Georga and pressuring him,” said Clooney. “None of that seemed to matter. This mattered. This puts Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka, all of them, into the dustbin of history. That name will now forever be associated with insurrection."
The actor is a public critic of President Trump, pointing to his refusal to universally endorse face masks, as one reason for the spreading coronavirus pandemic — now totaling 22 million U.S. cases.
“The idea that we politicize things like this is crazy,” Clooney told the New York Times in December. “Had Trump come out at the very beginning and said, ‘We’re all going to wear masks because it’s the right thing to do and it’s going to save a lot of lives,’ the whole country would have gotten behind him and he would have been re-elected. But he thought it would affect his economy, so he chose to say it didn’t exist. And now we’re going to have 350,000 people dead.” At present, the coronavirus pandemic has resulted in more than 371,000 deaths.
Clooney’s wife, human rights attorney Amal Clooney, has also criticized the president for discrediting members of the mainstream media. "Today, the country of James Madison has a leader who vilifies the media, making honest journalists all over the world more vulnerable to abuse," she said, without naming Trump, at the 2019 Global Conference for Media Freedom in London.
This week, the president was banned from Facebook and Twitter after many blamed him for provoking violence before the Capitol attacks. Following announcements by the social media platforms, a splintered Hollywood celebrated and slammed the decisions.
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