Photo: Press
Brian Eno has taken to Facebook to clarify his stance on Donald Trump after a Guardian interview quoted him as being “pleased” about the election result because “it gives us a kick up the arse and we needed it”.
“If Hillary Clinton had won,” he told the newspaper’s Simon Hattenstone, “we’d been business as usual, the whole structure she’d inherited, the whole Clinton family myth. I don’t know that’s a future I would particularly want. It just seems that was grinding slowly to a halt, whereas now, with Trump, there’s a chance of a proper crash, and a chance to really rethink.”
Eno has since posted a statement on Facebook to explain his position, dubbing Trump “a complete disaster”.
He wrote: “May I make something absolutely clear: I think Donald Trump is a complete disaster. And Brexit is a disaster too. That said, what I think is an even greater disaster is that we in the US and the UK – and increasingly the rest of the world – live inside political systems that can produce absurd results like these.”
He went on: “My hope – the only hope really – is that Trump in office will reveal himself for what he really is, and that the public will roundly and unequivocally reject him and everything he stands for – his terrible policies, his jingoism, his arrogance, his childishness, his lies, his prejudices and his small-mindedness. In rejecting Trump we’ll also start to take down the whole malignant media-political structure that so lovingly nurtured him.”
“We now see political careers built upon lies and deceit and encouraged by openly biased media organisations, more concerned about revenue and ratings than giving the public real information,” he wrote. “It’s this whole system that has to change… I believe that Trump can turn out to be not the beginning of a long decline, but the end of one - the turning point… Trump has proven beyond doubt that the system is broken, so let's fix it.”
