Jim Carrey has blamed Donald Trump for the New Zealand terror attack in a painting of him with a swastika on his forehead.
The actor shared the telling caricature to his Twitter account on Sunday night (March 17), portraying the president as a flaming meteor hurtling towards a very dried out-looking Earth.
It comes just days after a gunman opened fire at two mosques in Christchurch on March 15, killing at least 50 people and seriously injuring dozens more.
The alleged gunman was a white supremacist. Before the attack, he shared a 74-page ‘manifesto’, outlining his intentions.
In the document, he expressed support for the President of the USA and called him a ‘symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose’.
Trump sent a condolence tweet for those affected in New Zealand, but it wasn’t long before he sparked controversy by playing down the wider implications of the gunman’s ideology and implying violent white nationalism is not a growing problem by referring to the issue as ‘a small group of people’.
Carrey expressed his concerns for the state of civilisation and Trump’s leadership in his drawing, which he shared over the weekend.
Alongside the picture, the actor wrote:
Innocent people are now being slaughtered, families ruined and childrens’ lives destroyed. All in his name.
If the Craven Republican Senate allows this vile miscreant to continue encouraging devisiveness, the “Trump Presidency” will become an EXTINCTION LEVEL EVENT.
The Ace Ventura star wasn’t the only one to call Trump out for his controversial approach to white nationalism, as Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who announced her run for presidency this weekend, also took to Twitter to express her disapproval.
She wrote:
Time and time again, this president has embraced and emboldened white supremacists—and instead of condemning racist terrorists, he covers for them.
This isn’t normal or acceptable. We have to be better than this.
Yesterday, Trump complained about being blamed for Friday’s horrific events, tweeting:
The Fake News Media is working overtime to blame me for the horrible attack in New Zealand. They will have to work very hard to prove that one. So Ridiculous!
Acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, appeared on television on Sunday to argue against blaming Trump, saying ‘the president is not a white supremacist. I’m not sure how many times we have to say that.’
He also said:
To simply ask the question every time something like this happens overseas, or even domestically, to say, “Oh, my goodness, it must somehow be the president’s fault”, speaks to a politicization of everything that I think is undermining sort of the institutions that we have in the country today.
The issue of white nationalism is certainly one that needs to be taken seriously by everyone. Innocent people are losing their lives at the hands of it, and it should be condemned by those in the highest office.
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Emily Brown first began delivering important news stories aged just 13, when she launched her career with a paper round. She graduated with a BA Hons in English Language in the Media from Lancaster University, and went on to become a freelance writer and blogger. Emily contributed to The Sunday Times Travel Magazine and Student Problems before becoming a journalist at UNILAD, where she works on breaking news as well as longer form features.