“Even if it’s my friend, I have to at least and especially in a public forum as big as he has, you have to be able to stop it or talk about it in a more reasonable way, and so that’s why I wrote the letter, to create dialogue,” he said. “The message is I’ve known you forever as a person who’s been friendly to people from all ethnicities and religions and so forth… That should be your platform, that’s the platform that you operated on in the past.”
Simmons explained that, despite his critique of Trump, he still thinks of him as a good person at heart.
“Let me say this … he was a very sweet guy, he still is in his heart, I’m sure … I haven’t spoken to him recently since I said I thought Kim Kardashian would be a better president.”
Simmons also said that he was shocked that Trump is a legitimate contender for the nomination.
“I didn’t realize that he was a serious contender … I thought it was you know, not a joke, but I thought it was him inserting his point of view into the process. I didn’t know that he would be the leader, you know, I’m surprised,” Simmons said.
“You know we were founded, this country founded, on religious freedom, and those kind of statements are un-American, so it’s very important to me that we stand up in a case like this, because we have to remind people what this country was founded on and that’s why I wrote the letter,” he added.
Simmons finished by saying, “The most important thing we can do is protect all people in the way that we would like protection for ourselves, and I think right now the amount of Islamophobia in this country is at a high and it’s dangerous for us as a country that’s supposed to represent tolerance to have this level of hate brewing … and the fact that so many people support Donald Trump’s statement is a statement in and of itself.”
