Former California Governor and beloved action star Arnold Schwarzenegger had some choice words recently about the Jan. 6 capitol riots during the end of the Trump presidency.
The 74-year-old was interviewed by CNN personality Dana Bash on a podcast called Total Recall: California’s Political Circus, and he wasn’t shy about his feelings.
The events of January 6., he said, mirror Nazi Germany and shows “what happens to when people are being lied to about the elections.”
“This is so much kind of a feeling of what they were talking about when we were talking about in a Nazi time of when people were lied to all the time and what that led to,” he said. “I just felt that it was so sad of what happened on January 6. Eventually, this whole thing can go really quickly south.”
Schwarzenegger compared Donald Trump’s claims that the election was stolen to Adolf Hitler’s claims during his reign of power. Namely, he said the insurrection was just like the Nazi’s November 1938 Kristallnacht.
Kristallnacht, which means “Crystal Night” in German, saw Nazis attacking Jewish businesses all over Germany and Austria. The term comes from the broken glass covering the streets like snow after the attack. More than 7,000 businesses were damaged or destroyed during the attack.
Schwarzenegger said that the Nazi reign showed the world how when extremists rise to power, terrible things happen quickly.
The action star, who’s reprising his role as Danny Devito’s brother in the upcoming sequel to the 1998 movie Twins, called Triplets, is a conservative but vehemently opposes Trump. In a speech in January, he called the former president the worst ever.
“President Trump sought to overturn the results of an election and of a fair election. He sought a coup by misleading people with lies. My father and our neighbors were misled also with lies, and I know where such lies lead. President Trump is a failed leader. He will go down in history as the worst president ever. The good thing is he will soon be as irrelevant as an old Tweet.”
Strong words from Arnold Schwarzenegger on both fronts that will likely be discussed and debated online for some time.