‘Just Get Mike Bloomberg in There’

Longtime Hollywood Republican Clint Eastwood signaled that he may not help President Donald Trump’s re-election.

“The best thing we could do is just get Mike Bloomberg in there,” Eastwood advised the Wall Street Journal in a wide-ranging interview revealed Friday.

Eastwood, a uncommon conservative voice within the movie world who memorably spoke on the 2012 GOP conference, provided reward for “certain things that Trump’s done” however urged the president to behave “in a more genteel way, without tweeting and calling people names. I would personally like for him to not bring himself to that level.”

He additionally expressed disappointment within the total local weather heading into the 2020 election. “The politics has gotten so ornery,” he mentioned.

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Elsewhere within the interview, Eastwood provided his opinion in regards to the present tradition in Hollywood. “The #MeToo generation has its points,” Eastwood mentioned, praising girls for “standing up against people who are trying to shake you down for sexual favors.” He famous that sexual harassment has been a mainstay of Hollywood since he received his begin. “It was very prolific back in the 1940s and ’50s,” he mentioned, including, “and the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s…”

But whereas he didn’t defend disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein, now on trial in New York on a number of felony counts of sexual misbehavior, Eastwood did voice considerations that the frenzy of accusations may undercut the “presumption of innocence, not only in law, but in philosophy.”

Eastwood additionally defended his portrayal of the late Atlanta Journal-Constitution journalist Kathy Scruggs in his 2019 movie “Richard Jewell,” saying that Warner Bros. ought to have responded to the paper’s menace of authorized motion by telling them “to go screw themselves.”

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Eastwood mentioned he used creative license to change particulars about Scruggs’ life — suggesting that she slept with an FBI agent to get data for a narrative — which the paper denounced as “entirely false and … extremely defamatory.” (Scruggs died in 2001.)

Eastwood mentioned that no matter alterations he made to Scruggs’ private historical past, he nonetheless blamed the paper’s “reckless reporting” on Jewell, a safety guard who was suspected of planting a bomb that killed two individuals in the course of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Though Jewell was exonerated, Eastwood accused the paper of being “ultimately responsible” for Jewell’s dying in 2007. (Jewell died of coronary heart failure following problems from diabetes.)

The director additionally welcomed the prospect of a lawsuit. “If you want to just go call more attention to the fact that you helped kill the guy, go ahead and do it — if you’re dumb enough to do that,” he advised the Journal.