On Tuesday, actor Samuel L. Jackson took to the pages of Esquire to launch a profanity-laden smackdown against President Donald Trump, whom he sees as “ruining the planet.” Jackson also took the opportunity to issue a call to arms when it comes to criticizing those in power without fear when he added that “if you’re not saying anything, then you’re complicit.”
The Captain Marvel star has long been a frequent and outspoken critic of the president, and said that it wouldn’t matter if he had the limited platform of a garbageman instead of his current 7.8 million Twitter followers and 4.5 million Instagram followers, he would still “tweet that s**t out” if he had something to say.
“I’m not thinking about who I am and what my job is when I do that s**t,” he said.
Jackson also didn’t hold back when it came to talking about Republican members of Congress, particularly Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. He claimed that McConnell and other Republicans are “the same f***ng guys” who would call him the n-word when he was growing up in Tennessee.
“There was no doubt about where they stood, that you were never going to be their equal and, if possible, they were going to make sure you never had as much s**t as they had,” Jackson said.
“And they were worried about the chasteness of their women, and miscegenation, and not having enough of them, there being more of us than there are of them.”
The 70-year-old actor seems to be at the top of his game, racking up not just a single movie to debut at No. 1 this year with the opening of Captain Marvel, but two, following January’s top-spot debut of the M. Night Shamayalan-directed Glass , the long-anticipated follow-up to 2000’s Unbreakable .
But his outspoken political stance has garnered him nearly as much attention as his films since Trump took office. He frequently takes to those high-profile platforms to tweet out critiques of the president’s plans like arming schoolteachers, and he offered a cutting riposte to Trump’s post-Oscars claims that he “has done more for African Americans (Criminal Justice Reform, Lowest Unemployment numbers in History, Tax Cuts, etc.) than almost any other Pres!”
“Yeah, he’s got a bigger plantation,” Jackson said.
And one even higher-profile, typically profanity-laden Samuel Jackson swipe at the president came in the wake of the controversy surrounding Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a freshman Democrat from Michigan who made waves when she said on camera back in January that Congress was going to “impeach the motherf***er.”
Jackson’s response to those comments, which caused many on the conservative side to call for Rep. Tlaib to step down or at least be censured by her House colleagues, was to reach out to her on Twitter and praise her “clarity of purpose.”