Jeff Daniels: Trump is ‘the End of the Republican Party’

Actor Jeff Daniels tossed out some serious assertions in a lengthy interview with Deadline, among them his hope that “scorned” women, gun control activists, or Special Counsel Robert Mueller would be the “heroes” that remove President Donald Trump from office.

“I also think it’s the end of the Republican party,” Daniels says of Trump’s election. “I thought that in the middle of primaries, and then he gets the nomination. And then he wins. What?”

“But I think that’s why these guys are hanging on,” the Dumb and Dumber star says of Republican lawmakers in D.C. “Because if they don’t, if they impeach the President, you’ve got to go talk to that 32% base or whatever it is. Tell them why. Because a lot of those guys go back there and those people are going, ‘Don’t you touch my president.’ When do those guys have the guts to turn to their constituents and go, ‘you’ve been conned?’ I’m waiting for that day.”

Daniels is promoting his new Hulu series The Looming Tower, a dramatization of events leading up to the September 11, 2001 terror terrorist attacks. Daniel, who portrays the real-life FBI agent John O’Neil in the critically acclaimed drama, says he’s holding out hope that Mueller or “scorned” female voters or Parkland activists will be the “heroes” that help bring President Trump defeat in the upcoming elections.

“But I’m hoping the day will come where that kind of behavior is no longer considered acceptable,” the actor laments of Trump. “Something has to happen. An event. And it may be Bob Mueller. And it may be not just obstruction, or collusion, or this thing in the Southern District of New York with the porn star going to the hearing for Trump’s lawyer. Someone has to do something.”

“Who are the heroes going to be? Is Orwell just going to be right, and that’s it? That’s the end of the story? Who are the heroes going to be? Is it going to be Chris Wray? Is it going to be Bob Mueller? Is it going to be Rod Rosenstein? Is it going to be McCabe?” Daniels asks. “Is it going to be all those FBI agents, the CIA, who have been insulted for the last year or so that Trump’s been in power? Who’s going to rise up? And, who is it going to be in Congress? Who are the people that are going to be there in November 2018?”

“Are the heroes going to be the women that marched the day after the inauguration? Are they going to be there November 18? Hell hath no fury like a country full of women scorned. Be prepared to duck, orange man,” he continued.

“And then you’ve got the kids. An event happened. Parkland, Florida happened. Hardly the first. And those kids have mobilized everyone, I would hope, from voting age 18 and above, around the country,” Daniels says of the gun control activists. “After everything they went through, and everything they’re dealing with in the aftermath of that, that they’re able to go on CNN and put sentences together.”

“If all those people show up in November 2018, then maybe this kind of way of the world will make a turnaround. I’m hopeful. I still think there are some heroes out there,” the Emmy-winner added.

Elsewhere, Daniels, a Michigan native, argues that Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 by tapping “into all those white manufacturing males, and [other] men and women.”

“I live there. I live in Michigan. I live around all those people whose car jobs went to China and Mexico when the car companies figured out that the union wasn’t the only option; that they could build a plant somewhere else. And they did,” Daniels said. “And you’ve got a lot of angry white people that were working in mixed company; you know, white, black, Hispanic workers that were all on the same line for years. Now all of a sudden, that white guy, that white woman that worked the line is on the blocks. And white people don’t want to be on the blocks. Blacks and Hispanics are supposed to be on the blocks.”

Jeff Daniels has spent months rooting for President Trump’s political demise. In March, the actor told Stephen Colbert that he can’t wait for the day law enforcement officials throw President Donald Trump “in the back of a truck and take him away.”

Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson