Hollywood producer David Simon has called President Donald Trump a “racist moron,” a “race-hating fraud,” and a “permanent stain on our land.” Now that he has a new TV project to promote, the producer is looking for new insults to fling and has landed on a highly original one: Trump is the modern-day equivalent of fascism from the 1940s.
In a recent interview with Variety, Simon equates Trump administration policies with anti-semitism, claiming that the president treats brown and black people and Muslims the way Jews were treated during World War II.
Simon was promoting his new HBO limited series The Plot Against America, based on the 2004 Philip Roth novel. The series, which debuts next month, imagines an alternate universe where Charles Lindbergh has become president of the United States and fascism is running rampant.
The creator of HBO’s The Wire said the impetus behind the new series was President Trump.
“The reason to do the series today is not to settle the score of 1940 or to decide what America would have been under Charles Lindbergh, or to decide whether anti-semitism could have ever achieved some sort of American gulag or American Holocaust for Jews here,” he told the trade magazine.
“This is all allegorical to this moment. It’s not Lindbergh now, it’s Donald Trump. And it’s not Jews who are the most vulnerable cohorts among recent immigrant groups, it’s people with black and brown skin, people who are Muslims.”
He said that the original novel was “prescient” in anticipating President Trump.
“It’s a story of an American dystopia,” Simon explained. “It seems startlingly prescient in that it anticipates a politician who seizes upon a very simple message and is able to activate the worst fears and impulses of a significant number of Americans. He gets them to relinquish not only power, but some of the most essential bulwarks of self-governance.”
HBO recently released a trailer for the series, which stars Winona Ryder, John Turturro, and Zoe Kazan. In one scene, a character exclaims, “This is my country!” “Not any more,” replies another. “It is the Jew Haters. It is the America First-ers. It’s their country.”
President Trump has repeatedly denounced anti-semitism and all forms of racism. He has also strenghtened U.S. ties with Israel, including making good on his campaign promise to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
In a tweet on Sunday, David Simon claimed that “catering” to Israeli interests is really just more evidence of President Trump’s racism.
Catering to Israeli interests while at the same time activating and normalizing white nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism at home both excite and retain Trump’s political base. And the Xtian evangelical support of Israel is in fact rooted in anti-Semitic apocalyptic theologies https://t.co/pXJ8d7R9am
— David Simon (@AoDespair) February 23, 2020
Follow David Ng on Twitter @HeyItsDavidNg. Have a tip? Contact me at dng@breitbart.com
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