Calling for violence against President Trump, or at least casually joking about it, has become fairly routine since 2016. Now actor Jeff Daniels says America needs someone who will punch Trump “in the face,” reports Fox News.
Speaking with Stephen Colbert on CBS, Jeff Daniels touched upon the Democratic Party presidential primary debates and how they should pick a candidate who will give Trump a solid knuckle sandwich.
“This is the second debate out of 20?” said Daniels. “You know, whittle it down, but we need somebody that can take this guy on, that can punch him in the face.”
In the same interview, Daniels also talked about his recent performance in the Broadway rendition of “To Kill a Mockingbird” — in which he plays the iconic lawyer Atticus Finch.
“It’s a mixed audience, but there’s a lot of … liberal white America sitting out there,” said Daniels. “This play is like a right hook to their chin. You watch the movie, you read the book, but you feel the play.”
“When Tom Robinson gets sent to jail, he’s 100% innocent, and the only reason he’s going to jail is because he’s black, you see Tom Robinson chained up and walking across the stage on his way to the electric chair and it’s a long cross. You feel that and America needs to feel that stuff,” he said.
Later, Daniels spoke about the immigration debate and the people who believe the border should be shut down. “You tell me that you’re going to go to the voting booth and you’re going to go, ‘They shouldn’t have crossed the river.’ Now there are people out there who believe that. Go ahead. Vote for him. Do it,” he said.
Daniels added that “America needs to do better.”
Jeff Daniels has been a fierce critic of not only President Trump, but also Trump supporters themselves — the latter of whom he has previously uncharitably characterized as being motivated by racial animus. In fact, the actor even compared Trump rallies to a line from “To Kill a Mockingbird”: “A mob is a place where people go to take a break from their conscience.”
“That’s what I see when I look at Donald Trump’s rallies, that’s when I see the lies he’s spewing at these people, and people going, ‘I gotta believe in something,’ and he said he’d bring my manufacturing job back and he didn’t … but at the end of the day, it’s race. It’s race,” Daniels said on MSNBC back in May.
“This is about the Republican Party — or a wing of it — going: ‘This is our last chance to save the party. And if we don’t, it’s the end of the Republican Party.’ And the only way they can do that was to tap the race button and say, ‘Go ahead, it’s OK.’ And [Trump] did,” he said. “And they did. That was the only card they had left to play, and they played it. And they aren’t going to go quietly.”