Tom Hanks Spots 'Reason To Be Worried' For Democracy When Asked About Trump
Tom Hanks acknowledged concerns of a possible Donald Trump victory in November without naming the former president when asked about him on Thursday at a D-Day commemoration.
“Do you worry about the United States in case — in terms of its commitment to democracy and freedom and everything these people died for if there’s another Trump,” CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asked the “Saving Private Ryan” actor in an interview at the Normandy American Cemetery.
The actor attended Joe Biden’s speech marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day, where the president warned that democracy is “more at risk across the world than at any point” since the end of World War II.
“I think there’s always reason to be worried about the short term,” Hanks replied. “But I look at the longer term of what happened.”
Hanks, a history buff who describes himself as a “lay historian,” pointed to the preamble of the Constitution that begins with, “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union.”
“That journey to a more perfect union has missteps in it. We know — I can catalog them as much as you can and you’re a professional journalist and I’m just a guy that makes movies and reads books,” he said.
He continued, “Over the long term, however, we inevitably make progress towards, I think, that more perfect union.”
The actor, who once said a Trump 2016 presidential win would be a “dark day” only to assure Americans that the country was “going to be all right” just after the election, went on to flag how such a “perfect union” is spawned.
“It comes about because — not because of somebody’s narrative about who is right and who is a victim or not. It comes out of the slow melding of the truth to the actual practical life that we end up living,” he said .
“It comes down to the good deed that is practiced with your neighbor, with your local merchants,” he continued. “And I will always have faith that the United States of America and the Western societies that have adopted more or less the same sort of democracy, cannot help but turn towards what is right.”
