Actress Lena Dunham blasted President Donald Trump on social media Monday, comparing the president to convicted mass murderer Dylann Roof in a Twitter exchange with a late-night writer.
The Girls star responded Monday evening to Travon Free, a writer for TBS’ Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, who had written that he wanted to “help” journalists and analysts in America by telling them Trump “is a racist.”
“Not only is he a racist but he’s a racist with untreated mental illness,” Dunham replied to the last message in Free’s thread. “So under diff circumstances he’s Dylann Roof.”
Roof, a self-proclaimed racist and white supremacist, was convicted in 2016 of the murder of nine African-American churchgoers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015.
The then-21-year-old had entered the church during Bible study, and opened fire shortly thereafter.
Roof was later convicted on 33 counts of federal hate crimes and sentenced to the death penalty. In April, he was transferred to death row at Terre Haute Federal Prison in Indiana.
In this Monday, April 10, 2017, file photo, Dylann Roof enters the court room at the Charleston County Judicial Center to enter his guilty plea on murder charges in Charleston, S.C. (Grace Beahm/The Post And Courier via AP, Pool, File)
Actress Lena Dunham attends the Daily Front Row’s Fashion Media Awards at Four Seasons Hotel New York Downtown on September 8, 2017 in New York City. (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for Daily Front Row)
Dunham was one of former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s most vocal celebrity surrogates during the 2016 campaign, and one of Trump’s most fierce critics.
In April of last year, the actress-producer said that there was a “100 percent chance” she would move to Canada if Trump won the election. She later walked back the pledge, saying she’d made it when Trump was a “long shot” to win the presidency.
Dunham has also previously come under fire for her own comments about race.
Shortly before Election Day in November, the actress posted a video to her Twitter account appearing to celebrate what she called “the extinction of white men.” And Dunham has also been criticized for a lack of diversity on her HBO show Girls, which stars four white, female leads.
“We’re not going to make another show that has four white girls on the poster,” she said in a podcast interview earlier this year, “because now, we’ve been very deeply educated about how much representation matters.”
Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum