Martin Sheen torched the Trump administration during a conversation with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace Saturday and offered some advice to the president, telling him to stop listening to all the “sycophants” that surround him.
At MSNBC’s annual MSNBC LIVE ’25 event on Saturday, Sheen appeared as a live guest on Wallace’s “The Best People” podcast. During his and Wallace’s conversation, Sheen blasted Trump’s cabinet for not satisfying the American people’s “great hunger” for truth. “It’s a mighty battle going on. It’s not about winning or losing. It’s about being in touch with your own personal humanity because there’s such a lack of it coming from this administration,” Sheen observed.
“I’m convinced of this — that when you look at this group of people at the round table in the White House, the cabinet room, every one of those people look across the table and they do not see anyone who is better than they are,” Sheen continued. “They generally see a reflection of their [worst] selves. There’s no heroes in there. There’s no music. There’s no laughter. There’s no self-effacement. There’s no joy in that room. It smells of ego and fear and false worship.”
Sheen set his sights on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., noting his family’s legacy within the White House. “His father sat in that room [with] the ExComm committee in October 1962 during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Sheen remembered. “He literally, with his brother John, rejected an attack on Cuba and basically saved the world from nuclear annihilation.”
“He did it because he was in touch with his humanity and he understood the enemy was also human,” the “West Wing” actor added. “If we don’t find our own personal humanity, we cannot possibly find it or see it in each other.”
Sheen called for members of the Trump administration to embrace their humanity again. “If we’re lucky enough to surrender and accept the responsibility that we start as nothing basically, except our humanity, then we realize, ‘Oh my God, being human is all we need,’” Sheen explained. “We’re broken. It’s beautiful brokenness, because if you weren’t broken, nothing could get in to change you.”
The actor then turned his attention to Trump, telling the president, “You’ve got to realize, sir, that you are the biggest nothing in the world.”
“Stop listening to all these people around you, these sycophants who are encouraging you to be your non-human self,” Sheen urged Trump. “Get in touch with that humanity. Stop fussing with your hair and don’t worry about your tie and stand up straight and speak clearly — not from your throat. Speak from your heart and start being human. That’s what you were made for, not golf. So there you are, Mr. President, with all due respect, sir.”
You can check out Sheen’s full remarks in the video above.
