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Richard Gere Warns Dems ‘Went To Sleep’ And Rips ‘Maniac’ Destroying America

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Richard Gere
Photo Credit: Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Richard Gere is blaming political complacency for America’s Trump-era spiral, warning disaffected voters that the country reached what he called its darkest point because too many people stopped paying attention.

The 76-year-old actor delivered the blistering remarks Tuesday at the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway, where he reflected on President Donald Trump’s return to power and the state of the United States.

The aging actor said Americans had allowed the moment to happen through apathy, disengagement and a failure to persuade others before Election Day.

“We’re living in the darkest moment that I’ve experienced on this planet,” Gere said of life under Trump’s second term.

Then he turned the criticism toward the people who opposed Trump but, in his view, failed to do enough.

“How is this even possible? Because we went to sleep. We didn’t care. We didn’t vote. We didn’t really listen,” Gere stated.

The “Pretty Woman” star said he personally opposed Trump but still faulted himself for not doing more to persuade people in his orbit.

“Of course, I didn’t vote for this guy, but I didn’t do enough work to skillfully convince people around me, close to me, not close to me, that this was insane to elect this person as President of the United States.”

Gere did not lessen the attack once he turned to Trump himself. He called the president a “maniac” and accused him of tearing apart the country’s institutions and civic character.

He said Trump has “dismantled almost everything that was good about the U.S. government and the U.S. people.”

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The actor acknowledged that America had never been flawless, but argued that its strength had long been its ability to correct course.

He later framed Trump’s rise as almost unthinkable. “Did it ever cross your mind that America could sink to this level? Did you ever imagine that someone as crazy as this would become President of the United States and work to destroy it?” he asked.

During the same appearance, Gere invoked his recent visit to Dachau, the former Nazi concentration camp, as he urged listeners to recognize the warning signs of authoritarianism before it is too late.

He said the lesson was not only historical, but immediate. Gere described Dachau as a reminder of “how quickly our world can be taken from us if we fall asleep.”

The actor added that people cannot retreat into comfort and tell themselves that life is still manageable while dangerous political shifts are underway.

“We can’t sit back and go, ‘Ah, life is good. I’m fine. You know, I’ve got food. I got money. Blah blah blah. I got my house. I got another car. I’m thinking about this. I’m OK. I know he’s a bad guy, but it’s OK,'” Gere lectured. “But it’s not OK. It’s not OK. It’s never OK.”

The actor urged audiences to remain alert to what he described as the warning signs of authoritarian rule.

“We have to see the cues, this dictatorship of the monsters, how quickly it happens,” he continued. “We have to be vigilant.”

Two days later, Gere continued hammering the Trump administration during a speech in Berlin tied to a migration initiative launched by the Hertie School Centre for Fundamental Rights and The Gere Foundation.

There, he said he was “deeply ashamed” of the United States over its rhetoric toward immigrants.

The remarks came after Gere and his wife, Alejandra Silva, returned to the U.S. following roughly a year in Madrid. The couple had moved their family to Spain in late 2024 after Trump won the election.

At the Berlin event, Gere again asked how America could have fallen so far.

“Did it ever cross your mind that America could sink to this level? Did you ever imagine that someone as crazy as this would become President of the United States and work to destroy it?”

He then shifted to immigration, arguing that movement across borders is central to human history.

“Human history is, in many ways, the history of migration, of movement. It’s a story of people adapting, building, contributing, and dreaming. And yet, somehow, in today’s debates, we often speak about migrants, about refugees as if they were different from us.”

Gere said he had been told the U.S. government was now using the term “aliens” to refer to migrants.

“I think the term I was actually given today, apparently, the US government is calling aliens. Aliens. That’s the latest. It had been vermin, now it’s aliens. I’m deeply ashamed of this, I want you to know.”

He continued by arguing that migrants are too often treated as if they belong to “another category of human beings.”

“They belong to another category of human beings, as if their hopes and fears and aspirations were somehow less legitimate than our own,” he went on.

“The simple truth that we’re all connected by movement, by our own humanity, by journeys that have come before for us.”

Gere has been warning about Trump for years, and his recent comments echoed remarks he made earlier this year in Spain.

While accepting a lifetime achievement honor at the Goya Awards in February 2025, he described America as being in a “very dark place.”

“We’re in a very dark place in America, where we have a bully, a thug, who’s the president of the United States. But it’s not just in the U.S., it’s everywhere,” Gere said.

The audience applauded as he warned that authoritarianism was not limited to one country.

“Authoritarianism takes us all over. We have to be vigilant, we have to be alert,” he cautioned. “We have to be energetic. We have to be brave. We have to be courageous.”

Speaking with reporters at the same event, Gere also criticized the concentration of wealth and political power in the U.S.

“He’s irresponsible and it’s a real danger that billionaires are controlling America… If you associate money and power, it’s a dark place to be. These clowns dressed as presidents appear immature and narcissistic. That kind of power is killer.”

Gere also discussed the direction of the U.S. in a December 2025 interview with Variety after hearing the Dalai Lama, whom he called a close friend, speak.

He said the experience left him thinking about America being on the “very wrong track.”

Gere said he did not know how anyone could explain what Trump “has done to this country” or “what it feels like to be an American now,” calling it “astonishing.”

“If we want a world a certain way, then we have to elect leaders who have a similar vision to us and will lead us towards this higher level of possibility — who we are as individuals and how we can create a world, a society where people can live with each other rather than this battlefield every day, all day long, with the craziness,” Gere monologued.

“Especially, as I say, coming from this very crude mentality that is now in our leadership.”

Gere’s public criticism of Trump dates back to the president’s first term. At the Berlin Film Festival in 2017, while promoting a movie, he said Trump “has pushed it to the limit.”

Using the old fast-food ad line “where’s the beef?” Gere argued that Trump lacked substance.

“With him, there’s no beef there, there’s no protein, there’s no center, there’s no resonance,” he remarked.

He also accused Trump of damaging public attitudes toward refugees.

“The most horrible thing that Trump has done is conflate two words – refugee and terrorist. That’s what he’s done,” Gere said at the time.

“Instead of refugees being someone we want to help, now we’re afraid of them, and the biggest crime is conflating these two ideas. We have to understand what he and the Conservative movement has done.”

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