Donald Trump may be “teaching” America a valuable lesson, Ethan Hawke said on Tuesday.
“It’s entirely possible that Trump is doing us a great favor by teaching America what oligarchy means,” the three-time Oscar-nominated actor told Variety from the red carpet at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday. “I think a lot of young people, myself included, didn’t even know what it meant,” he added, recalling that when Sen. Bernie Sanders would talk about “the top one percent, we all would roll our eyes.” Now, Hawke said, “You’re like, ‘Oh, I see what they mean.’”
“And so sometimes you need to have your freedoms taken away to know what they mean,” he said. “I wish that were not true.”
Hawke also told the publication that he “never felt scared” about what he would say publicly, until the last couple of years, where you feel like, “‘Oh, I have to be careful.’”
“There’s a kind of fear in the air that I’ve never felt before,” he continued. “And it’s not America. To get to be an artist in a free country, I’ve had enough of an education to know what a privilege that is. And I don’t feel that way anymore. And that’s something that has to change.”
Hawke’s comments from the festival, where his film The Weight premiered, come after his sit-down with Trump-enthusiast Joe Rogan last month. Hawke and the podcast host discussed a myriad of topics during the interview, but didn’t touch on politics or even mention Trump.
Rogan has continuously pushed back against critics who call Trump and his administration fascist, for example, but Hawke didn’t go there with Rogan in December.
He was resolute that “fascism” was the name of the game when it comes to Trump, as he spoke to Variety on Tuesday, however.
“What fascism looks like today is not what it looked like before,” he said. “Propaganda, social media—everything’s different now. The rules of engagement are different. We all know what greed and oppression are. And we all know what to do. We feel the truth in our stomachs.”
