Arnold Schwarzenegger slammed President Trump and Republicans in new video speech delivered Sunday. The actor compared the riots at the U.S. Capitol to Kristallnacht, the infamous Nazi attack against the Jews.
“I grew up in Austria,” Schwarzenegger said. “I’m very aware of Kristallnacht, or ‘the Night of Broken Glass.’ It was a night of rampage against Jews in 1938 by the Nazi equivalent of the Proud Boys.”
“Wednesday was the Day of Broken Glass right here in the United States. The broken glass was in the windows of the United States Capitol. But the mob did not just shatter the windows of the Capitol. They shattered the dead we took for granted. They did not just break down the doors of the building that housed American democracy; they trampled the very principles in which our nation was founded,” he continued.
Schwarzenegger’s feud with Trump began when he took over The Apprentice from the billionaire. The action star also blamed the president for inflaming racism and anti-Semitism in the country, as well as Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results in his favor. “President Trump is a failed leader,” the former California governor said. “The good thing is soon he’ll be as irrelevant as an old tweet.”
Schwarzenegger, a Republican himself, criticized his fellow GOP members for not standing up to the president. He said, “But what are we to make of those elected officials who have enabled his lies and his treachery? I will remind them of what Teddy Roosevelt said, ‘Patriotism means to stand by the country, it does not mean to stand by the president.’ John F. Kennedy wrote a book called Profiles in Courage. A number of members of my own party because of their spinelessness will never see their names in such a book, I guarantee you. They’re complicit with those who cared the flag of self-righteous insurrection into the Capitol. But it did not work.”
“We need to hold accountable the people that brought us to this unforgivable point. And we need to look past ourselves, our parties and disagreement and put our democracy first. And we need to heal, together, from the drama that just happened. We need to heal, not just as Republicans and Democrats, but as Americans.
