Tina Fey: Trump “can’t muster the dignity of seventh grader”
Tina Fey is worried that “we’re in a bit of a throwback moment” since the election of Donald Trump.
In a conversation with David Letterman for the Hollywood Reporter -- in conjunction with Fey being awarded the magazine’s Sherry Lansing Leadership Award -- the “30 Rock” star got real discussing how eye-opening the last month has been -- and how much the president-elect’s behavior compounds the hostile environment online.
“I definitely came out of last month feeling misogyny is much more real than two years ago. But the thing I worry about [more] than actual human interaction is the internet,” she said. “It’s metastasizing now, thanks to our glorious president-elect who can’t muster the dignity of a seventh-grader. It’s so easy for people to abuse each other and to abandon all civility.”
Letterman concurred, adding that current events have him “full of apprehension and self-loathing.” Fey then lamented the fact that the former “Late Show” host retired from television before this year’s election results.
“I think if you were on TV, you’d be helping us with this, Dave. How are we going to proceed with any kind of dignity in an increasingly ugly world?” she said.
“In a world where the [president-elect] makes fun of handicapped people and fat people, how do we proceed with dignity? I want to tell people, ‘If you do two things this year, watch Idiocracy by Mike Judge and read [Nazi filmmaker] Leni Riefenstahl’s 800-page autobiography [Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir] and then call it a year.”
But online, at least, Fey sees some reason for hope -- namely pal and former co-star Alec Baldwin’s ongoing feud with the president-elect.
“At one level, it just makes me feel sick for the state of the world because it’s so beneath a president,” she said of Trump’s Twitter behavior. “But also my feeling is, ‘You think you’re good at being a jerk on Twitter? You will now face the grandmaster of being a jerk on Twitter.’”
