Arnold Schwarzenegger schools Trump on Nazis in withering video message
In the continuing war of words between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Donald Trump, this is the Austrian Oak’s most scorching criticism yet.
Arnie took to the web yesterday to show the president how simple it is to denounce nazis, racism and bigotry, and slammed his talk of there being ‘two sides’ to the story in Charlottesville last weekend.
In a video posted to Twitter – which contains some upsetting imagery – he said: “There are not two sides to bigotry, there are not two sides to hatred. If you choose to march with a flag that symbolizes the slaughter of millions of people, there are not two sides.
.@Schwarzenegger has a blunt message for Nazis. pic.twitter.com/HAbnejahtl
— ATTN: (@attn) August 17, 2017
“The country that defeated Hitler’s army is no place for Nazi flags.”
Trump has been criticised on both sides of the aisle for his initial failure to effectively condemn the far right, who marched against the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville last week in a protest which ended with the death of a woman and injury of many more when a man said to be a nazi sympathiser drove his car into a crowd of counter protesters.
After eventually condemning racism and the neo-Nazi groups involved, he backtracked again during a bizarre press conference this week, in which he went back to blaming both sides.
In the video message, Schwarzenegger talks of his first-hand experience of the men who fought for the Nazis in World War Two on returning to Germany, speaking of those ‘who came home from the war filled with shrapnel and guilt’.
He also writes an effective speech for Trump, reading it out to the camera.
The video has – at the time of publishing – been viewed over 11 million times, and retweeted over 60,000 times, in just a few hours.
Trump has been somewhat quiet about Schwarzenegger of late, following some initial tweets mocking the actor and former governor of California when ‘The Apprentice’, the show Arnie took over from Trump, was axed by NBC.
Whether he’ll remain quiet about this remains to be seen.
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