Rob Reiner calls Trump a 'moron,' says U.S. 'fighting the last big major battle of the Civil War

Famed liberal filmmaker Rob Reiner spoke out against Republican President-elect Donald Trump in Washington on Monday night, calling him a "moron" and noting his victory at the voting booth means "we are fighting the last big major battle of the Civil War."

At a National Archives screening of his new movie "LBJ" — on President Lyndon Johnson's rise to the Oval Office after President John F. Kennedy's assassination — Reiner said that only twice in American history after an election "people en masse took to the streets. One was Abraham Lincoln, and the other was Donald Trump. And for obviously ... 180-degree different reasons, but both based on race."

"To me, the scariest part of what we saw with Donald Trump was not understanding how much racism still existed in this country," he added.

Reiner said racism was "kind of papered over for a while" from the Civil Rights Act of the 1960s through the election of President Barack Obama, the first black president, in 2008. "So we thought, 'OK, we are moving in the right direction, everything is moving,'" he continued, before adding that "we didn’t realize that this undercurrent of racism was still there, virulent and kind of down, suppressed."

He also called out "60 Minutes" host Leslie Stahl whose interview with Trump aired Sunday night.

Image source: YouTube

"It’s embarrassing," Reiner said of the sit-down. "It is embarrassing that somebody who has a national platform would softball this moron. He’s a moron."

Reiner also said the media "normalized" Trump "for a long, long time. And that’s a disgrace."

The famed director has been critical of Trump throughout the campaign season. He made the racism charge earlier this year in an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," saying “there is racism in this country that has been submerged for a long, long time” and Trump has “unearthed a lot of it.”

(H/T: LAist)