Hollywood Director Flames ‘Autocrat’ Trump, Warns We Have 1 Year Before ‘Democracy Completely Leaves Us’

Hollywood director Rob Reiner is warning America has one year until President Donald Trump unleashes a “full-on autocracy” on the country.

“People have to understand our democracy is being taken away from us, and we only have about a year,” Reiner said while appearing on MSNBC Sunday.

Reiner noted that “these ICE agents and National [Guard] troops that are going into these cities to quote, unquote ‘curtail violence’” is “just the beginning” of the end of the country’s democracy.

Earlier this month, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held a rare meeting with hundreds of senior U.S. military officials in Quantico, Virginia.

Speaking at the gathering, Trump suggested the military should use “dangerous cities as training grounds.”

“I told [Hegseth], we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military — National Guard, but our military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon,” Trump explained. “That’s a big city with an incompetent governor.”

Trump also mentioned San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles before claiming that there is a “war from within.”

“Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security,” Trump added.

In recent weeks, Trump has deployed the National Guard to multiple cities, including Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.

Reiner went on to give props to host Ali Velshi and other political commentators for doing a “great job” of voicing and covering “what’s actually happening in this country.”

“But make no mistake, we have a year before this country becomes a full-on autocracy and democracy completely leaves us,” he said.

Mentioning the 2026 election, Reiner said “Trump knows that in a free and fair election he will lose,” adding, “This is the last thing he wants.”

Reiner then argued that most Americans don’t understand the term “democracy” nor how close we are to losing it under the Trump administration.

“We have to make the public absolutely aware that their democracy is being taken from them,” he added. “And we have to do everything we can to make sure people understand that … It’s a vague term, democracy. It’s like, ‘What does that mean? The Constitution, we don’t know what that means.’”

Elsewhere in the interview, Reiner declared to Velshi that it’s Hollywood’s “job” to warn the “rest of the country” about the impending threat Trump poses.

“Our job now as communicators is to start communicating to the rest of the country, to let them know what is going to happen to them,” Reiner said. “The two big things that an autocrat needs: They need control of the media, which is what they’re trying to do. And they need military control of the streets. And that’s the other thing that we’re seeing.”

The “Wolf of Wall Street” actor wrapped up his comments by telling Velshi that the country is “sliding downhill in a very, very fast way.”

“We have to find a way to stop it,” Reiner added.

Watch Reiner’s appearance on MSNBC below.