Arnold Schwarzenegger has message for President Trump: Terminate hate

Gregory Korte | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Arnold to Trump: "There are not two sides to bigotry." Former California governor and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger responded to Trump's recent comments about racially charged violence saying, "...the country that defeated Hitler's armies is no place for Nazi flags."

WASHINGTON — "Let me help you write your speech a little bit," says Arnold Schwarzenegger in a video message to President Trump.

The Austrian-born actor and former California governor says Trump has a "moral responsibility to send an unequivocal message that you won't stand for hate and racism." And so in a video posted on Facebook this week, Schwarzenegger drafts the speech that he says Trump should have given after last weekend's violence in Charlottesville after neo-Nazis and white supremacists protested the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee:

"As president of the United States, and as a Republican, I reject the support of white supremacists. The country that defeated Hitler's armies is no place for Nazi flags. The party of Lincoln won't stand for those who carry the battle flag of the failed Confederacy."

Schwarzenegger then turns to a Trump bobblehead doll and asks, "Was it that difficult? See, I told you."

Trump and Schwarzenegger have clashed before, most notably after the Terminator star attempted a revival of Trump's reality show The Apprentice — which was soon canceled for bad ratings.

The two-term Republican governor of California has his own complicated family history with Nazism. Born in Austria in 1947, Schwarzenegger's father had been a member of the Nazi party and its infamous storm troopers. That past only came to light after the younger Schwarzenegger asked the Simon Wiesenthal Center — a Jewish anti-hate group Schwarzenegger has supported over the years — to investigate.

In a message to neo-Nazis and other white supremacists, Schwarzenegger says bluntly,

"Your heroes are losers."

"I knew the original Nazis," Schwarzenegger says in the video. "Growing up, I was surrounded by broken men, men who came home from a war filled with shrapnels and guilt, men who were misled into a losing ideology. And I can tell you: that these ghosts you idolize spent the rest of their lives living in shame and right now, they're resting in hell."