Widely renowned gay Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar said President Donald Trump will “go down as a catastrophe” and dedicated his latest film award to Hunter Schafer, a transgender actress who has publicly criticized Trump’s transphobic policies.

While accepting the Lincoln Center’s Chaplin Award in New York City on Monday, Almodóvar dedicated the award to “the thousands deported in recent weeks, to the beautiful Hunter Schafer as well, and to Harvard University” for the school’s “determination to not surrender to Trump’s war on knowledge and culture which remain the best weapons to fight lies and misinformation.”,

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His comment referenced the documented immigrants whom Trump has illegally kidnapped and shipped off to torture camps, as well as Schafer — who recently criticized Trump for issuing her a U.S. passport with a male gender marker — and Harvard, the Ivy League university that refused to comply with the Trump administration’s threatening demands. The university sued the administration after it froze billions in funding in retaliation for Harvard’s non-compliance.

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Mentioning Schafer’s passport, Almodóvar said, “That cruel whim by… bureaucrats, that there are only two genders, does not change the nature of the human being and its sexual diversity.”

The 75-year-old director then said, “Mr. Trump: I’m talking to you. And I hope that you hear what I’m going to say to you. You will go down in history as the greatest mistake of our time. Your naiveté is only comparable to your violence. You will go down in history as one of the greatest dangers to humanity in this beginning of the century. You will go down in history as a catastrophe.”

Earlier in his speech, the director said, “I doubted if it was appropriate to come to a country ruled by a narcissistic, authoritarian lunatic who doesn’t respect human rights and who it seems nothing can stop in his race to change the fragile world balance.” He compared visiting the U.S. these days to visiting North Korea or Russia.

Almodóvar’s award-winning films, like the 2002 film Talk to Her, contain queer characters and colorful, camp scenarios. His better-known films include Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), Bad Education (2004), and more recently, the gay Western short film Strange Way of Life (2023) starring trans ally Pedro Pascal and The Room Next Door (2024) starring queer actress Tilda Swinton.

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