Bob Geldof. Zero Emissions Resource / Flickr
The latest Irish celebrity to speak out against the Republican nominee for US president Donald Trump is Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats. He has some pretty strong words.
Speaking at the One Young World Summit in Ottawa, Canada, before an audience of 1,300, Geldof proclaimed, “Who believes any more that trade amongst the nations will lift us all out of the great evil that everyone has spoken of, poverty? And especially now that a liar, a fool and a racist vomits his bile on to the disinherited of the United States!”
The Live Aid founder classified Trump as one of the “commanders in the armies of stupid,” which he also believes to include Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin, among others.
"We’re tired. We’re so tired, aren’t we? Everything seems so complex. Nothing seems to work. And the politicians, leaders and experts are not to be trusted or believed. And so, let us give up on belief. Let us surrender to the post-truth politicians, those reality television actors, the Trumps, the Putins, the Erdogans, the Brexiters. We must not succumb to the fools. We must not be galled by the awful thuggishness of Putin, Erdogan, Xi or Trump, or the many other commanders in the armies of stupidity,” he riffed.
He also attributed some of the blame for the current state of political affairs to the mainstream media, saying, "But the future is not binary. It’s not that false choice of utopia or dystopia so beloved of journalists, commentators and writers. There is a constant adjustment of circumstance and morality that an impatient electorate or distracted populous is loath to accept or acknowledge, and thus they leave us to fools like Trump, or Johnson in the U.K. or bullies like Putin."
He closed with, “What is so funny about peace, love and understanding?”
Geldof followed in the footsteps of U2 frontman Bono, who last week accused Trump of “hijacking the Republican party” in the United States.
In a "CBS This Morning" interview, Bono called the US “the best idea the world ever came up with,” but Trump “potentially the worst idea that ever happened to America.”