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The legendary American entertainer Dick Van Dyke, best known for his comedic turns in the 1960s television series The Dick Van Dyke Show and Disney's 1964 film Mary Poppins, is also a man of serious political convictions. During the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Van Dyke, then 90 years old, made the rounds of television and radio talk shows promoting the candidacy of Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders (then 74), whose progressive policy ideas he hailed (and whom he jokingly referred to as a promising young politician). When Sanders lost the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton, Van Dyke threw his support to the latter. The alternative, he said in an opinion piece for the Hollywood Reporter, is a nightmare -- by which he meant Republican candidate Donald Trump. The last thing that scared me as much as Trump, Van Dyke wrote, was the Cuban Missile Crisis — if he's elected, I think we'll be at war almost instantly. In a quote attributed to Van Dyke in 2016 that was still making the rounds as an Internet meme two years later, he allegedly described Trump as a man who wants to be the dictator, and said the millions who follow Trump share his anger, paranoia, and his hatred: We learned while trying to authenticate the quote that Van Dyke himself had tweeted the meme shortly before the November 2018 midterm elections, indicating not only that the sentiments were indeed his own, but that his opinion of Trump had not changed over the course of the first two years of his presidency: As to the origin of the passage, it was assembled from remarks Van Dyke made during a radio interview with Tavis Smiley on 21 October 2016, three weeks before the presidential election. After quizzing Van Dyke about his support for Bernie Sanders, Smiley asked the actor for his thoughts about Donald Trump. Here are the relevant excerpts:
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