Hollywood actor and Hellboy star Ron Perlman has announced a “break” from Twitter and hinted that he feels like the lone anti-President Donald Trump voice speaking “in the wilderness.”
Appearing on Russia Today’s broadcast of the Larry King show this week, Perlman said he feels like a “voice in the wilderness” lately and feels exhausted by Twitter.
Perlman started his interview with an attack on the president saying that to New Yorkers, Donald Trump is “a joke” and is “all sizzle and no steak.” But after becoming president, Perlman said, “he’s gone from being a joke to a real threat” because of the “horrific” positions that he has taken as president.
As far as Perlman is concerned, Trump has always been a racist.
“I think that he fundamentally has always been a racist,” Perlman proclaimed. Like many extreme liberals, the actor then insisted that there is “no debate” over his contentions. “I think that his racism is not up for debate. I think that he is using his power to finally unmask all the things that he needed to do in order to be successful in business. Which was his only goal in life was to make money at the expense of anybody that got in his way. There’s no morality to his voracious need to create wealth.”
Neither King nor Perlman, though, noted that as president, Donald Trump has donated every cent of his presidential salary to charity or other governmental initiatives.
Perlman also said that the “dismantling” of Barack Obama’s legacy is proof of Trump’s racism.
“This dismantling of the Obama legacy is so deliberate and so unmasked, and so mean-spirited — no matter how good an idea it was, no matter how bad an idea it was, whether it was a Republican idea, a Democratic idea, a centrist idea — he’s out to make sure that we forgot the first black president, that he never existed,” he exclaimed.
The Sons of Anarchy star lamented that ideas that just seemed like a “stunt” when Trump was just a media personality are now a threat to the nation.
King next brought up Perlman’s constant, profanity-laced anti-Trump and anti-Republican tweets and noted that the actor recently said he is taking a break from twitter over feelings of being “a voice in the wilderness” with his extreme hate of the center-right.
“But most of all,” Perlman said during a Twitter rant on May 5, “I am sick and tired of being a voice in the wilderness; abandoned by our so-called guardians of the constitution who sit by and watch it all burn. Who display cowardice in the face of assault, knowing that all that is sacred is being burned and still do nothing.”
King was somewhat incredulous over the actor’s claim of feeling “alone” in his anti-Trump rage — especially on Twitter. “There’s many voices like yours. Where were you alone?” King asked.
The actor went on to explain that his overwrought emotional state was starting to wear on him. “I began to feel like a drone,” he said of his near hourly anti-Trump tirades. He also felt that his constant stream of hate-filled tweets were having little impact and that he now wants to “keep his powder dry” and only speak when his voice can affect meaningful change.
Perlman concluded his comments about Twitter saying that he can’t “fix this stuff” and noted that all he can do is “point it out, but that’s as far as it can go.” And he also insisted that Twitter itself is just a “self-indulgent” waste of time.
On Twitter, the actor said, “all the people that agree with me are going to agree with me no matter what, and all the people that disagree with me are going to disagree with me, and you’re not really making that much of a … it’s a very kind of self-indulgent kind of thing at a certain point.”
Still, despite the claim that he is taking a break from the social media service, Perlman has continued to tweet and attack Trump and Republicans on the social media platform.
Perlman next went on to attack Trump’s administration, namely Vice President Mike Pence and EPA chief Scott Pruitt, calling them Donald Trump’s “ship of fools.”
The actor also said that his support of America’s veterans was important to help stop the “23 suicides a day” of military veterans. It is a statistic that is bandied about but one that doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny. By other more careful studies, the rate, while still devastating, comes down to 1.5 such military-related suicides.
Perlman ended his interview with King saying that he loves to play bad characters that have redeeming qualities and wants roles that have “complexity, nuance, and layers.” But he added that he would not want to play Trump because the president is just flat out evil.
“Somebody asked me how would I feel about playing Trump,” Perlman told King. “And I said I would never want to play Trump. There’s nothing, there’s no duality there. There’s no irony there, there’s no cleverness there. He’s just what he is, he’s one dimensional, and there’s no redeeming quality.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.
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