Ingrid Laas
Ed Asner in Madison, Wisconsin, in December 2019.
Ed Asner, the former president of Screen Actors Guild and most Emmy-awarded actor, has been an icon of the Hollywood left for about forty years. Now for the first time, he is publicly speaking out about the recent clash between the actors’ union and former President Donald Trump, saying that both are better off being separated from each other.
Regarding the resurgence of white supremacists and neo-Nazis that Trump unleashed, Asner says, “They’ve been lurking around here for a long time. We have our racists and our Nazis.”
On January 19, what is now the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists announced that the union’s “National Board voted overwhelmingly to find probable cause of a violation of SAG-AFTRA’s Constitution by member Donald J. Trump, and ordered the matter to be heard by SAG-AFTRA’s Disciplinary Committee as required by the SAG-AFTRA Constitution.”
The Screen Actors Guild says the action was taken because of “Trump’s role in inciting the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and in sustaining a reckless campaign of misinformation aimed at discrediting and ultimately threatening the safety of journalists, many of whom are SAG-AFTRA members.” It said it was seeking the most severe available penalty: expulsion from membership.
Rather than submit to a disciplinary hearing, Trump resigned from SAG-AFTRA. In his typically self-promoting February 4 resignation letter, the former President blasted the union as “promoting dangerous un-American policies and ideas,” and quipped: “Who cares? . . . You have done nothing for me.”
Happy to be rid of Trump, who has had bit parts in movies and starred in a reality TV show, SAG-AFTRA issued a pithy two-word response to the ex-reality game show host’s self-purging: “Thank you.”
But Asner, who was the Guild’s president from 1981 to 1985, has harsher words.
“First of all, it’s laughable that Donald Trump would be considered a union man in anybody’s eyes or ears,” Asner tells The Progressive in an interview. “We’re better off without him. He didn’t get us any brownie points because of the intensity of his followers out there. We don’t need him and he certainly doesn’t need us.”
This is not the first time that the activist/actor has clashed with U.S. Presidents. During the 1980s, when he was SAG president, Asner sharply criticized President Ronald Reagan over his policies in Central America. This was an especially delicate matter, as Reagan had also been a Screen Actors Guild president in the 1940s and 50s. The ensuing brouhaha and backlash resulted in CBS’s cancellation of Asner’s Lou Grant television drama.
For Asner, it was a matter of principle. In Oliver Stone’s 1991 JFK, Asner played ex-FBI agent Guy Bannister, who is suspected of being part of an alleged conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. “The military was probably involved,” Asner theorized when I interviewed him in 2018. “The secret government of the United States, who are the rich. Between the two of those elements, I think his assassination was arrived at.”
Asner, in contrast, gives high marks to the current administration. “Biden is doing a wonderful job,” he tells me. But Asner is “appalled” by Republican efforts to restrict voting. “What kind of bullshit is that?” he asks. “Oh, how horrible! How terrible! That [in] the land of the free and home of the brave we’re going to find out who shouldn’t vote rather than who should. There was a time I trusted my government; I’m not sure I trust it anymore.”
At age ninety-one, Asner is still acting; his string of recent credits include portraying a Jewish Holocaust survivor in Tiger Within. Regarding the resurgence of white supremacists and neo-Nazis that Trump unleashed, Asner says, “They’ve been lurking around here for a long time. We have our racists and our Nazis.”
The Trump/SAG-AFTRA dispute raises touchy issues. It’s important to stress that the attention-seeking poseur Trump—a media showboat and purported billionaire who poses as a friend of the working class—was a professional actor with a union card.
But even here, Ed Asner’s fundamental commitment to fairness rings clear. Asked whether Trump should still be able to draw his hefty SAG-AFTRA pension, Asner replies in the affirmative.
“If he’s eligible, I don’t think we should attempt to restrict him in any way,” Asner says. “If he’s qualified to earn that pension from his activity in SAG-AFTRA, then he should get it.”