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Rob Reiner On Trump's America: 'We Are Fighting The Last Battle Of The Civil War'
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Rob Reiner (Photo by Rob Kim/Getty Images)
Rob Reiner—actor, writer, director, producer, activist, and political tweeter—was out this week promoting his new film LBJ (about the struggles Lyndon B. Johnson faced when he took office after JFK was assassinated). At a screening at the National Archives on Monday night, he took the opportunity to speak out against Donald Trump, the press, and specifically Leslie Stahl, who softballed the new President-elect during his first interview on 60 Minutes Sunday.
We are fighting the last big major battle of the Civil War. There’s only been two times in the history of America where upon the election of a president, the people en masse took to the streets. One was Abraham Lincoln, and the other was Donald Trump. And for obviously, you know, 180-degree different reasons, but both based on race. To me, the scariest part of what we saw with Donald Trump was not understanding how much racism still existed in this country. It was kind of papered over for a while. I mean, we had the Civil Rights Act, we had the Voting Rights Act and then in the ’70s we had All In The Family started shining a light on racial unrest. And then we had a lot of enormous success by African-Americans in the media, in the news and so on. And then culminating with an African American president.
So we thought, OK, we are moving in the right direction, everything is moving. But what we didn’t realize that this undercurrent of racism was still there, virulent and kind of down, suppressed.
I don’t know if you saw Leslie Stahl [Sunday] night. It’s embarrassing. It is embarrassing that somebody who has a national platform would softball this moron. He’s a moron.
And that man is in the White House now, and the press normalized him. They normalized him for a long, long time. And that’s a disgrace.
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