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Trump Calls Spike Lee’s Oscar Speech a ‘Racist Hit on Your President’

Spike Lee holding his Academy Award for best adapted screenplay at the Oscars Governors Ball on Sunday.CreditPatrick T. Fallon for The New York Times

Spike Lee holding his Academy Award for best adapted screenplay at the Oscars Governors Ball on Sunday.CreditCreditPatrick T. Fallon for The New York Times

By Alex Marshall

Feb. 25, 2019

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On Sunday night, Spike Lee won his first competitive Oscar, thenmade an acceptance speech that gained a standing ovation. But the events did not please at least one person apparently watching: President Trump. On Monday, he called Lee’s speech a “racist hit on your President.”

Lee opened his speech, after winning best adapted screenplay for “BlacKkKlansman,” by discussing slavery and his family’s experiences of it. “I give praise to our ancestors, who have built this country into what it is today along with the genocide of the native people,” he said.

“The 2020 presidential election is around the corner,” Lee said. “Let’s all mobilize. Let’s all be on the right side of history. Make the moral choice between love versus hate.”

[Read our analysis of the ceremony.]

Lee did not mention the president in his speech, but that call to action seems to have angered him. “Be nice if Spike Lee could read his notes, or better yet not have to use notes at all, when doing his racist hit on your President,” Trump said in a tweet in the early hours of Monday morning.

The president’s policies had “done more for African Americans (Criminal Justice Reform, Lowest Unemployment numbers in History, Tax Cuts, etc.) than almost any other Pres!” the president added.

Trump did not dwell on the issue for long. Shortly afterward hetweeted about “oil prices getting too high,” and a forthcoming meetingwith Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea (“With complete Denuclearization, North Korea will rapidly become an Economic Powerhouse,” he wrote).

[Read Lee’s speech here.]

Theo Dumont, Lee’s publicist, said the director would not be commenting on Trump’s tweet.

“BlacKkKlansman” is based on the story of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan. In interviews around its release, Lee said he wanted to draw a link between the Klan and events today. “We had to connect David Duke to Agent Orange,” he told The New York Times, using his own term for the president.

At the end of “BlacKkKlansman,” Lee included footage of the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., that descended into violence when protesters clashed with counter protesters. He then showed footage of Trump saying there was blame on “both sides” for those events.

When “Green Book” won best picture at the ceremony on Sunday, Lee made a disgusted gesture and started walking out of the theater as “Green Book” producers gave their speeches. Backstage, when asked by reporters about the coronation of “Green Book,” which detractors complain has a retrograde view of race, Lee replied, “No comment.”