On Sunday, actor Sean Penn, erstwhile buddy of the late socialist dictator Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, took the opportunity to mock President Trump contracting COVID-19, tweeting, “I like presidents who don’t get COVID-19.”
I like presidents who don’t get Covid-19.
— Sean Penn (@SeanPenn) October 4, 2020
Actor James Woods, a staunch Trump supporter, responded bluntly to Penn’s snarky tweet: “I like presidents with brass ba**s.”
I like presidents with brass balls. https://t.co/KcOld8ni2C
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) October 5, 2020
After Chavez’s death in 2013, Penn told The Hollywood Reporter, “Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion … Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of vice president [Nicolas] Maduro.”
Penn has made no bones about his hatred for President Trump. In March 2018, The Daily Wire reported:
Sean Penn’s debut novel characterizes a Trump-like America as “a nation in need of an assassin,” according to the Daily Mail. Penn’s 176-page fiction novel, titled Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, tells the story of a “modern American man, entrepreneur, and part-time assassin.”
“Actor Sean Penn’s debut novel’s main character calls for the assassination of the president and dares the commander-in-chief to ‘Tweet me, b****,’ DailyMail.com revealed.” …
At the book’s end, Bob Honey admits himself to a hospital where he pens a note to the President of the United States — a Trump doppelganger who goes by the name “Mr. Landlord.” In the note, Penn has his character Bob Honey call for an assassination of the president.
Penn’s intense dislike of President Trump aside, in early May, the Bakersfield Californian reported that Penn and his non-profit organization worked to start a free COVID-19 testing center:
Kern County Board of Supervisors chair Leticia Perez welcomed the soft-opening of Kern County’s first free COVID-19 testing center Monday morning with the help of actor-director Sean Penn and his emergency relief organization. The center, located at the Richard Prado Senior Center in east Bakersfield, aims to test all symptomatic residents, local first responders and healthcare workers for COVID-19 regardless of their socioeconomic circumstances.
In May, Penn appeared on The View and discussed the coronavirus, which he compared to an “active shooter.” He stated:
I don’t think we need to attach a face, a personality, or what somebody was sending on their social media to be able to identify an active shooter. … An active shooter is anything that is continuing to kill people, and our brothers and sisters and fathers and daughters and sons. This is — this virus is the active shooter, and if we were — I think that if we could wrap our head around it in that way and understand that it’s principally putting in the radical people of color, elderly people, indigenous people, but randomly selecting all of us, that we need to huddle around and make very clear decisions on how to approach this thing.
“I think the problem is that people are speaking without any knowledge of what they’re speaking of,” he continued. “This testing should be thought of, again, in a very, very basic way, in this kind of active shooter way of looking at it,” he said. “This is a weapon that can get into any neighborhood, it get into any school, get into any, as we know, any retirement home, elderly care home, and out the street and in the market. So of course, we have to test if the idea is that human life cares — matters, and those kinds of comments I think are, they’ll normalize a disconnect between who we are, and who we want to be as a country and as a people.”