Sean Penn Slams Donald Trump’s Response To COVID-19 Calling It Like A ‘Machine Gun’

Sean Penn criticized Donald Trump’s administration for the way it handled the COVID-19 pandemic.

On July 11, during a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, he said, “It really felt like someone with a machine gun gunning down communities that were the most vulnerable from a turret at the White House.”

Penn also called Trump’s administration “obscene.”

“We were not only as a country but as a world, let down and ultimately neglected misinformed, had truth and reason assaulted under what was in all terms an obscene administration, humanly and politically,” he said.

He then said President Joe Biden‘s way of handling the pandemic felt like “the sun was rising.”

Penn was asked about his own COVID-19 relief efforts. He helped create the largest testing system in Los Angeles with the help of his organization, CORE. In September, he performed a star-studded virtual table read of Fast Times at Ridgemont High to raise funds for the organization.

Flag Day, a film based on Jennifer Vogel‘s 2005 memoir, Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father’s Counterfeit Life, is the first movie he directed himself along with his daughter, Dylan Frances Penn and his son Hopper Jack Penn.

During the conference at Cannes, he said he thought of his daughter while reading the book, which is about Vogel’s struggle of coming to terms with her father’s past as a con artist.

“There were certain images that come emotionally to one when they read something … the first image I had when I was reading this script the first time was [Dylan’s] face,” he said.

When Penn was asked if the movie resembled his own experience as a parent, he said to check his IMDb for the “months of the jobs” he took during his daughter’s childhood.

“One of the great things about the privilege I’ve had in working in film and being a parent is that, while there are periods of time where one’s away … once you’re done with that job, you’re the only parent in town 24/7, and that’s when the kids get upset,” he said.