Beloved Oscar-winning actor and director Robert Redford, who has passed away at the age of 89, was a fierce critic of President Donald Trump in his final years.
The Hollywood icon, best known for his roles in The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and All the President’s Men, died at his home in Utah surrounded by family. His cause of death has not been revealed.
Beyond his Hollywood career, Redford also gained a reputation for his outspoken political views and longstanding support for the Democratic Party, which saw him awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by former President Barack Obama in 2016 in recognition of his decades of activism for environmentalism and LGBT rights.
Redford also took aim at Trump for his attacks on democracy throughout his rise to power and across both terms in office.
In 2015, Redford was cautiously optimistic about Trump, crediting him for “shaking things up” during an otherwise dull Republican primary. “I’m glad he’s in there because him being the way he is, and saying what he says the way he says it, I think shakes things up, and I think that’s very needed,” he told Larry King, before later clarifying that he only enjoyed Trump as a ‘character’ and did not support his policies or presidential campaign.
During Trump’s first term in office, Redford admitted that “For the first time I can remember, I feel out of place in the country I was born into and the citizenship I’ve loved my whole life.”
Writing on the Sundance Institute website in 2018, he added: “For weeks I’ve watched with sadness as our civil servants have failed us, turning toward bigotry, mean-spiritedness, and mockery as the now-normal tools of the trade.”
Nevertheless, following Trump’s first electoral victory, Redford admitted in an NBC op-ed in 2019 that “although he was not my choice, I honestly thought it was only fair to give the guy a chance.” But his support was short-lived, as “almost immediately, he began to disappoint and alarm me,” he admitted.
“We’re up against a crisis I never thought I’d see in my lifetime: a dictator-like attack by President Donald Trump on everything this country stands for,” Redford wrote. “It’s time for Trump to go—along with those in Congress who have chosen party loyalty over their oath to ‘solemnly affirm’ their support for the Constitution of the United States.
In a separate opinion piece in the Washington Post earlier that year, Redford slammed Trump for “degrading everything he touches,” and called on voters not to be placated by the impeachment process and instead “reject hatred and division” by voting him out of office in 2020.
During that year’s election cycle, Redford came out as a strong supporter of Joe Biden, whom he praised for his “fierce compassion” in comparison to Trump.
Writing for CNN that year, at the height of the COVID pandemic, Redford wrote, “Instead of a moral compass in the Oval Office, there’s a moral vacuum. Instead of a president who says we’re all in it together, we have a president who’s in it for himself. Instead of words that uplift and unite, we hear words that inflame and divide.”
He added, “Four more years would accelerate our slide toward autocracy. It would be taken as free license to punish more so-called ‘traitors’ and wage more petty vendettas—with the full weight of the Justice Department behind them.”
Nevertheless, Trump chose not to acknowledge the barrage of criticism lobbed his way when speaking to reporters about the star’s death on Tuesday. During a press conference at the White House, Trump led tributes to the actor and said, “Robert Redford had a series of years where there was nobody better.
“There was a period of time when he was the hottest. I thought he was great.”
The post Robert Redford Slammed Trump as a ‘Dictator’ With ‘No Moral Compass’ appeared first on The Daily Beast.
