Trump as president? Clooney says no way
CANNES, FRANCE— George Clooney used his Cannes Film Festival appearance Thursday to declare, “There’s not going to be a President Donald Trump” and to blame the media for making it seem a possibility.
“That’s not going to happen,” the Hollywood actor/director flatly said about a possible Trump takeover of the U.S. presidency, at a festival press conference following the world première of Jodie Foster’s hostage drama Money Monster.
“It’s not going to happen because fear is not going to be something that drives our country. We’re not going to be scared of Muslims, or immigrants or women. We’re not actually afraid of anything.”
Clooney, a vocal supporter of Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign, was responding to a question as to whether Money Monster, opening Friday in Toronto theatres, is a “harbinger” of hard Trump times to come.
Clooney’s character in the movie is a loudmouth TV financial guru whose bad stock tip causes a ruined investor to take him hostage during a live broadcast.
The usually smiling and joking Clooney turned serious as he gave his reply. While denying the possibility of a Trump presidency, Clooney blamed the media for giving Trump a soapbox and few tough questions.
“Trump is actually a result, in many ways, of the fact that much of the news programs didn’t follow up and ask enough questions. That’s the truth,” he said.
“It’s really easy, because your numbers go up. All these cable news numbers — 24-hour news doesn’t mean you get more news, it just means you get the same news more.
“The ratings go up because they can show an empty podium saying, ‘Donald Trump is about to speak,’ as opposed to taking those 30 seconds and saying, ‘Let us talk about refugees,’ which is the biggest crisis in the world, that’s going on in the world right now.”
He appealed to news organizations to get back to the traditional journalist role of asking tough questions and demanding straight answers to them.
“Would really all of the (media) corporations fall on their knees if we actually informed (people) a little bit?”
“So I think that this movie is point- ing at and talking about one of the things that I think is a great disaster in the way we inform ourselves right now, which is we’ve lost the ability to get to and tell the truth and get to the facts.”
Clooney was flanked at the press conference by his Money Monster co-stars — his longtime friend Julia Roberts amongst them — and also Foster, who first came to Cannes 40 years ago when she was the 12-yearold child star of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, which won that year’s Palme d’Or.
Foster said that even though she wants Money Monster to play as a mainstream thriller, the film has “a lot of ideas, a lot of big ideas” and she’s glad that people are seeing it as canvas for them.