Sean Penn has joined the growing list of celebrities who have condemned Donald Trump’s racist comments about African nations and earthquake-ravaged Haiti.
In an op-ed for Time magazine, the 57-year-old Oscar winner referred to POTUS as “an enemy of Americans” as well as “an enemy of compassion,” after he was accused of referring to third-world countries as “shitholes” during a Thursday meeting about immigration reform. Penn, who is the founder of the J/P Haitian Relief Organization, also underscored the dire conditions on the Caribbean Island, as well as the resilience its population has shown in the years following the 2010 earthquake that left more than 300,000 people dead.
“Today is the eighth anniversary of that awful day in 2010. I still smell the blood and death that greeted us in that humid air upon arrival and through our first months in the country,” the actor wrote. “[…] On this day, we should be recognizing their grace, courage, loss, hardship and heroism. We should be mourning those lost to a curable poverty, to avoidable cholera, to Hurricane Matthew. We should be remembering the America that rose to its defining grace in support of this great and troubled island nation, which has supported and loved us. Instead, we have been forced to focus on a man whose sense of our country is an inherited gift for sales-gab.”
Penn went on to say Trump’s reported remarks were “far worse than mere insensitivity or even nationalism. Those standards are not disgraceful enough.” He argued that the only way our country can remedy its divisiveness is by everyone recognizing that Trump is “an enemy of compassion.”
“We can be unified not only with each other but with Africa, El Salvador, Haiti, Mexico, the Middle East and beyond if we recognize President Donald Trump is an enemy of Americans, Republicans, Democrats, Independents and every new child born. An enemy of mankind. He is indeed an enemy of the state.”
You can read Penn’s full piece here.
Trump has denied describing certain nations as “shithole countries” during the meeting with lawmakers.
