There are many things for which a person might criticize President Donald Trump, like the fact that he “doesn’t have any policies, he has whims,” as Harrison Ford put it in commentary to The Guardian. “It scares the shit out of me. The ignorance, the hubris, the lies, the perfidy. [Trump] knows better, but he’s an instrument of the status quo and he’s making money, hand over fist, while the world goes to hell in a handbasket.”
This could apply to literally anything Trump is doing. But Ford was specifically addressing the president’s takes on climate change, which Trump has called “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” Counter: Ford said “I don’t know of a greater criminal in history” than Trump. He also said Trump doesn’t like wind turbines because “he has just not seen a gold one” and that the president’s legacy on the climate crisis would be “a clear expression of ignorance, of hubris and purposeful subterfuge.”
Ford has “been preaching this stuff for 30 years” regarding conservation and environmentalism, with a few choice words for Trump in recent years as well. (The actor called the politician a “son of a bitch” on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2020.) Receiving a conservation leadership award at a ceremony at Chicago’s Field Museum on Wednesday evening, the Star Wars alum spoke about his optimism for the future amid the dire need to create change, praising Indigenous people for their land stewardship. Last year, he eloquently observed to Variety how “we’ve been purposefully disaggregated into serviceable political units,” which has led to Americans having a hard time finding common ground. “But if you look at the economy, you’ll figure out where the commonality is—it’s where it always was: Rich get richer, and poor get poorer. And that ain’t exactly right.”
Ultimately, Ford doesn’t think Trump and his ilk will succeed in destroying the planet. “He’s losing ground because everything he says is a lie,” Ford said. “I’m confident we can mitigate against [climate change], that we can buy time to change behaviors, to create new technologies, to concentrate more fully on implementation of those policies.”
