Actor Harrison Ford sharply criticized President Donald Trump on Friday over his approach to climate change, saying the president governs on “whims” rather than science or policy.
“It scares the s— out of me,” Ford told The Guardian. “The ignorance, the hubris, the lies, the perfidy. [Trump] knows better, but he’s an instrument of the status quo and he’s making money, hand over fist, while the world goes to hell in a handbasket.”
“It’s unbelievable,” the veteran actor added. “I don’t know of a greater criminal in history.”
Ford said he hoped Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda would ultimately fail, arguing that the president is “losing ground because everything he says is a lie.”
“I’m confident we can mitigate against [climate change], that we can buy time to change behaviors, to create new technologies, to concentrate more fully on implementation of those policies,” Ford continued. “But we have to develop the political will and intellectual sophistication to realize that we human beings are capable of change. We are incredibly adaptive, we are incredibly inventive. If we concentrate on a problem we can fix it most times.”
Ford, known worldwide for his iconic roles as Han Solo in the Star Wars franchise and as the adventurous archaeologist in the Indiana Jones series, also took aim at Trump’s long-running dislike of wind energy, joking that the president probably opposes turbines because “he has just not seen a gold one.”
The interview with The Guardian took place ahead of Ford’s appearance at the Field Museum in Chicago on Wednesday, where he received a conservation award from the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. The organization, named after the late biologist E.O. Wilson, honored Ford for his decades of environmental advocacy. Ford and Wilson were close friends until Wilson’s passing in 2021.
The actor has long been an outspoken critic of Trump. In 2024, he publicly endorsed former Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential run against Trump.
“The other guy [Trump], he demands unquestioning loyalty, says he wants revenge,” Ford said in a campaign video supporting Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D).
Prior to the election, Ford’s fictional portrayal of President James Marshall in Air Force One ranked among the most admired movie presidents in a National Research Group poll, alongside Morgan Freeman’s President Tom Beck from Deep Impact and Bill Pullman’s President Thomas J. Whitmore from Independence Day.
