George Clooney has always used his fame as one of Hollywood’s top celebrities to push for progressive ideas and speak out against bad things happening under the Trump administration.
Today, during the Venice Film Festival, where he was given the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award, he had another chance to show how far away the actions of Trump and his supporters have gone from what’s considered normal or acceptable.
After accepting the award, Clooney took the chance to express his thanks and reflect, but he also used the moment to strongly criticize U.S.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.He focused on Hegseth’s recent post on social media, where he mocked the appearance of Canadian military cadets.
Clooney said, “You see what the Secretary of Defense just tweeted out, a picture about women from the military in Canada, and you’re going, ‘What’s wrong with you?'” He asked where the sense of decency was in all of this.
This came after Hegseth shared a screenshot of Canadian cadets with the caption “(this is real)” along with a Canadian flag emoji — which many thought was a way of mocking the young cadets.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had already called the post “beneath their office.”
Clooney also talked about the bigger problem he sees in today’s politics: “I’m ashamed of all that.
The idea that cruelty is the base — that being cruel and unkind is part of the fun of all of this.”
He didn’t stop there.
Clooney used a strong historical term to describe the current administration: “There’s a great word: kakistocracy, which is a country run by the least qualified people.I think maybe we have a kakistocracy right now, but we’ll get through it.”
Clooney, who has lived through tough times in American history, gave some thoughtful perspective.
“I’m old enough to have been through 1968 in the states, when every city in the United States was set on fire, and we lost Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy…The capital was surrounded with tanks.We’ve had some other difficult times, but this is one of them.”
Even through all this, Clooney stayed hopeful.
He pointed to November’s midterms as an important chance to check the balance of power and looked ahead to 2028 with hope for “some restoration into some normalcy.”
This is the state of American leadership right now: a Defense Secretary mocking teenage military cadets from an allied nation for laughs, while a genuine Hollywood elder statesman has to stand on an international stage and remind the world that basic decency shouldn’t be optional in government.
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