Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns piled on Donald Trump in a new interview, comparing the presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s political ascent to that of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and accusing Trump of lusting after his own daughter.
“Nowhere in the history of the United States has their been a more unqualified person — just ask a historian,” Burns said in an interview with the Daily Beast.
“There’s a limit on free speech and we ought to have had the wisdom to not provide the oxygen to this demagogue,” the Civil War director said. “This is what happened to Hitler in Germany: he tried out crazy rhetoric and was surprised when nobody pushed back on it so he just kept saying it, doubling and tripling down, and then look what happened to the German people.”
Burns has bashed Trump relentlessly over the past month. During his commencement address at Stanford University in June, the 62-year-old filmmaker called the real estate developer an “infantile, bullying” “charlatan” and an “insult to our history.”
During his interview, Burns, referencing the five young men who were wrongfully convicted of a vicious rape and beating of a woman in Central Park in 1989, called Trump “temperamentally unsuited” to be U.S. president after he “shamefully took out a full-page ad in all of the New York dailies asking for a restoration of the death penalty for two 14-year-old, two 15-year-old, and one 16-year-old innocent children.”
Asked for his thoughts on Hillary Clinton’s 1996 remarks in which she called gangs of young black kids “super-predators,” Burns said “I find Donald Trump more of a super-predator.”
“This idea that he can attack and attack and attack whole groups of people, and that we live in a media culture where that’s permitted to be tolerated—it’s the spectacle and not the truth of it,” the filmmaker said.
Turning his attention to evangelical voters, Burns wondered how Christians could support and vote for a man who, he claims, publicly “lusts after his own daughter.”
“Evangelicals are voting for Donald Trump. What part of Donald Trump reminds you of Jesus Christ?” the four-time Emmy-winner asked. “Trump lusts after his own daughter on national radio, talks about women’s bodies and breasts in such a disparaging way, and mocks them. How is this in any way Christian? When you make the ‘other’ the enemy, how is that Christian?”
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @jeromeehudson
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