Spike Lee has said former US president Donald Trump will go down in history with “the likes of Hitler”.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker criticised Trump in an acceptance speech at the New York Film Critics Awards, where he was honoured for his short film New York New York.
The speech was pre-recorded on the same day as the deadly US Capitol riots, where a mob of Trump’s supporters stormed the government building.
Lee said of the riots: “The whole world is laughing at the United States of America’s so-called cradle of democracy.
“We’re living at a very serious time in America, and all of us have to think about what’s important.”
He continued: “We’re at the crossroads now. And everybody please be safe. This is not a game. These people got guns, with ammunition and people get killed behind this bullshit.
“This president, President Agent Orange, will go down in history with the likes of Hitler...”
“All his boys, they are going down on the wrong side of history,” he added.
Lee spoke out against Trump on a number of occasions during his presidency.
In 2018, he called the former US leader a “motherfucker” over his response to the Charlottesville terror attack the previous year, where activist Heather Heyer was killed by white supremacist James Fields ploughing his car into a group of people who had been peacefully protesting against a white supremacist march.
He said: “We have a guy in the White House – I’m not going to even say his fucking name – who in the defining moment, not just for Americans but for the world was given a chance to say: ‘We are about love and not hate.’
“And that motherfucker did not denounce the motherfucking clan, the alt-right and those Nazi motherfuckers. He could have said to the world: ‘We are better than that’.”
In a recent interview with Deadline, Lee also spoke of Trump’s legacy: “No matter how bad we talk about Agent Orange [Trump], it’s even a more condemning comment on Americans as a country that 70 million people voted for this guy.”
He added that his spoke for the future was that the “world becomes humane”.