Russell Simmons, who says Donald Trump has been an “amazing friend” to him for more than three decades, is urging the GOP presidential candidate to “stop the bullshit.”
In an open letter to Trump, Simmons, a business tycoon who’s co-founder of the record label Def Jam, tells the former “Celebrity Apprentice” host: “Stop fueling the fires of hate. Don’t feed into the rhetoric created by small-minded people. You’re smarter and certainly more loving than you let on.”
{mosads}Simmons credits his role as chairman of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding for pushing him to “fight bigotry of all kinds.”
“My friends, both Muslims and Jews, are saying there are so many comparisons between your rap and Hitler’s, and I cannot disagree with them, Donald.”
Trump ignited a media firestorm Monday when he proposed temporarily banning Muslims from entering the United States.
“You are a generous, kind man who has built a career on negotiations deals where everybody wins. Now, you seem like a one-man wrecking ball willing to destroy our nation’s foundation of freedom,” Simmons tells Trump in his message.
Simmons, who says he goes way back with the real estate mogul and has stayed at his home in Florida on a number of occasions, told the entertainment show “Extra” that he penned the letter to send a message to Trump that “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.”
“You have been many people’s champ in the past,” Simmons writes in his letter, “but now you are becoming a major embarrassment. I know the cheap seats are easy to play to, but you can get them by being the man I have known for nearly 30 years.”
Saying he and Trump are “polar opposites on many of the issues,” Simmons concludes his open letter by writing, “I will be campaigning rigorously against you. But if you win, I might still accept an invitation to straighten you up every so often.”