“As you can tell, I don’t say his name,” Spike Lee told the hosts of The View Friday after referring to President Donald Trump only as “Agent Orange” while promoting his new Vietnam drama, Da 5 Bloods.
Oh, we’ve noticed.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker’s appearance on The View came only hours after another video interview he did on Thursday’s The Daily Show (er, The Daily Social Distancing Show, as its been called the past few months).
“From the very beginning we’ve been fighting for this country, from the beginning!” Lee told host Trevor Noah while discussing Crispus Attucks, the first person killed during the Boston Massacre (and thus the American Revolution). “We’ve been fighting for this country, as you said, that doesn’t fight for us. We’ve been loving this country that doesn’t love us. So when this guy Agent Orange talks about our brother Colin Kaepernick [the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback seemingly blackballed from the NFL for kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality] not being patriotic, that’s some b-s. … It’s about the same thing that people are marching all across the streets in this world.”
Lee’s presidential nickname goes beyond The View and The Daily Show. The filmmaker has used the moniker, referencing both the president’s artificial tan and the long-controversial chemical weapon used by U.S. military forces in Vietnam, in virtually every interview he has done promoting Da 5 Bloods. He also used the term making the press rounds for his last film, BlackKklansman, which won the famed provocateur his first competitive Academy Award, for Best Adapted Screenplay. “Agent Orange had a chance to condemn the [Klu Klux] Klan, Alt-right, Neo-Nazi [movements], but he didn’t do it,” Lee told Yahoo Entertainment about Trump’s highly scrutinized “very fine people” comments after the Unite the Right rally and killing of counterprotestor Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
Da 5 Bloods follows four black Vietnam vets (Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis and Isaiah Whitlock Jr.) back to the Southeast Asian country to recover the remains of their fallen squad leader (Chadwick Boseman) as well as a case of gold they buried after salvaging it from a crashed helicopter. Lindo’s PTSD-suffering Paul has become an apologetic, MAGA hat-sporting Trump supporter, and is ridiculed by his friends and fellow vets for voting for the “Klansman in the Oval Office.”
This article was originally posted on yahoo.com/entertainment/.
