Steven Soderbergh Compares Trump to Movie Villain

Steven Soderbergh misses the Old Hitler.

The “Sex, Lies and Videotape” auteur told Variety how much he pines for President George W. Bush.

God, the George W. Bush-era seems like the golden age now. Who would have thought we’d find ourselves wishing that things were that simple?

The two-term Republican president was slammed as Hitler throughout his White House days. Kanye West even told a telethon audience that Bush didn’t “care about black people.”

That was news to African nations that received billions in aid from the 43rd president.

Soderbergh shared that thought and more during a Variety Q&A tied to his latest film, “Black Bag.” The thriller stars Michael Fassbender as an intelligence officer tasked with investigating his wife for treasonous ties. The film co-stars Cate Blanchett, Naomie Harris, Pierce Brosnan and Regé-Jean Page.

Soderbergh shared details about the film until the interviewer nudged the conversation into modern-day politics.

It’s all the excuse he needed to tee off on President Donald Trump.

…we’re in a place right now where our ideas of what that office means are evolving. We have to ask ourselves if these traditional tropes of “good guy, bad guy” are real anymore. We have somebody in that office whose behavior mostly aligns with the behavior we would call villainous in a movie, right? And yet, he was elected by a lot of people. It makes you wonder if we got this wrong. Are people going to the movies and rooting for the villain, and we’ve just been pretending that that’s not true? 

Soderbergh didn’t weigh in on the previous president, who hid his dementia from the public, handed Afghanistan over to the Taliban and waged war against free speech on multiple fronts.

Perhaps his next Variety chat will tackle those issues.