Spike Lee is calling out President Donald Trump again.
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the famed director and longtime critic of Trump delivered an unfiltered take on the Republican leader’s tenure in the White House while comparing him to former President Richard Nixon.
“I’m a child of the ’70s, and I think the history of this country is artists,” Lee began. “The Vietnam War, the songs, the movies. Black, white, brown people stood up against a war that was wrong. Jackson State. Kent State. The Democratic Convention, Chicago and those cops going crazy cracking heads.”
The filmmaker continued, “And they were saying, ‘The whole world is watching.’ But it is a shock. We haven’t seen this exactly. I mean before, I mean not even Nixon did the stuff this guy is doing.”
The disgraced former president, who served from 1969 to 1974, has been condemned for creating a war on drugs to criminalize Black people in the ’70s. The targeted move, which involved the spreading of harmful stereotypes and implementation of harsh jail sentences for Black people, crippled the Black community with lasting ramifications.
Nixon also made disparaging remarks about Black people, Jews and the LGBTQ+ community among others in uncovered audio tapes.
Elsewhere in the interview published Tuesday, Lee argued that his classic 1992 biopic “Malcolm X,” based on the Black revolutionary and human rights activist’s autobiography, couldn’t be made in today’s political climate.
“I don’t like to get into what-ifs, but a lot of these people [who own movie studios] were at the [Trump] inauguration,” he said. “I’m not naming names, but it is not an exaggeration to say that [Malcolm X] cannot be made today with where we are in this world.”
Lee has criticized Trump on multiple occasions.
The Oscar winner likened Trump to Adolf Hitler in an impassioned acceptance speech at a film critics awards show shortly after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot in 2021.
“We’re living at a very serious time in America … this president, President Agent Orange, will go down in history with the likes of Hitler,” Lee said at the time. “These guys — all his boys — they’re going down on the wrong side of history.”
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