Tim Allen opened up briefly about what it means to be a conservative in Hollywood in 2017 during an interview with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel Thursday night, explaining that one must be “real careful” in talking about President Donald Trump or else risk being beaten up.
“You’ve gotta be real careful around here. You get beat up if you don’t believe what everybody believes,” the 63-year-old Last Man Standing star told Kimmel when asked about his attendance at Trump’s inauguration in January.
“This is like ’30s Germany. I don’t know what happened,” he added. “If you’re not part of the group, ‘you know what we believe is right,’ I go, ‘Well, I might have a problem with that.'”
Allen told Kimmel he had never been to anything like Trump’s inauguration before.
“This government does stuff big,” he said. “Just so many people, and when they show up, you know, the ex-president gets in a helicopter and there’s jets and marines taking him this way and there’s parades, but it looks like a Cadillac parade, everything was just rows of Cadillacs.”
“My kids were going, ‘Is this the parade?’ It’s like black Cadillac after black Cadillac and then a tractor,” he joked.
Allen was one of the few celebrities with positive things to say about Trump during the 2016 campaign. The comedian complimented Trump in January of last year, telling the Hollywood Reporter that Trump seemed like a candidate who “might be able to do the stuff that really needs fixing.”
“Give that guy the roads, bridges, infrastructure, power grid — just have him fix that sh*t for four years. He’s good at that,” the actor said at the time. “And he’s a businessman so he understands how debt load works.”
In an interview with Megyn Kelly after the election, Allen called out anti-Trump celebrities in Hollywood for being “hypocritical” during the 2016 campaign.
“What I find odd in Hollywood is that they didn’t like Trump because he was a bully,” Allen told Kelly. “But if you had any kind of inkling that you were for Trump, you got bullied for doing that. And it gets a little bit hypocritical to me.”
In his sit-down with Kimmel Thursday night, Allen also joked about how Americans are willing to embrace ever increasing surveillance as long as we recognize the brands associated with it.
“If the government drove down the street in a gray sedan with a camera on it, you’d be rioting, going to Washington,” he said. “But if it’s white, with emojis and ‘Google’ on it, hey, you’re waving at it! They’re taking pictures of your house!”
Watch Allen’s interview with Kimmel above.
Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum
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