Harrison Ford doesn’t hold back on his criticism of Donald Trump: “I don’t know of a greater criminal in history”
Screen legend Harrison Ford has torn into U.S. president Donald Trump over his stance on climate change.
Hollywood icon Harrison Ford has ripped into Donald Trump over the U.S. president’s “criminal” opposition to efforts to combat climate change.
“Scares the shit out of me”
Trump “doesn’t have any policies, he has whims”, Ford told an interview with The Guardian this week. “It scares the shit out of me. The ignorance, the hubris, the lies, the perfidy.
“[Trump] knows better, but he’s an instrument of the status quo and he’s making money, hand over fist, while the world goes to hell in a handbasket.”
Ford, an actor who has twice portrayed fictional U.S. presidents on the big screen, added: “It’s unbelievable. I don’t know of a greater criminal in history.”
“He’s losing ground”
A long-term critic of climate science, Trump branded the concept of climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” in a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in September.
“If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail,” the Republican president told audience members.
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has invested in the burning of fossil fuels and blocked clean-energy initiatives. As he also did during his first term as president, Trump has taken the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on climate-change mitigation.
However, Ford told The Guardian of his optimism that humanity can overcome Trump’s assault on environmental science to make meaningful progress in combatting climate change.
“He’s losing ground because everything he says is a lie,” the 83-year-old said. “I’m confident we can mitigate against [climate change], that we can buy time to change behaviors, to create new technologies, to concentrate more fully on implementation of those policies.
“But we have to develop the political will and intellectual sophistication to realize that we human beings are capable of change. We are incredibly adaptive, we are incredibly inventive. If we concentrate on a problem we can fix it most times.”
“Turning us against each other”
A regular Trump critic, Ford publicly endorsed the president’s Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, ahead of last year’s election.
In a video announcing his support for Harris in the days before her defeat to the Republican, Ford lambasted Trump, warning of his divisive effect on U.S. society.
“He spent four years [during his 2017-2021 first term] turning us against each other, while embracing dictators and tyrants around the world,” Ford said. “That’s not who we are.”
The actor added: “What we need is a president who works for all of us.”
Speaking to Variety in July, Harrison reiterated his criticism of Trump’s polarizing influence on the U.S. - a country in which a majority of voters told a major recent poll that political divisions are now too deep to be overcome.
“Compromise is fair and honest”
“The pendulum doth swing in both directions, and it’s on a healthy swing to the right at the moment,” Ford said. “And, as nature dictates, it will swing back.
“But currently the issue is not who we are, but that we’re not who we used to be because we’ve been purposefully disaggregated into serviceable political units.
“And that has caused the middle to become frayed and tenuous, and the middle is where we belong. Not because it’s banal and safe, but because it’s fair. Compromise is fair and honest.”
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