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Madeleine Albright's Eclipse Tweet Sends A Poignant Message About Trump

by Seth Millstein
Alex Wong/Getty Images News/Getty Images

As millions took to the streets Monday to view a once-in-a-lifetime celestial event, Madeleine Albright trolled President Trump about the eclipse on Twitter. The former Secretary of State posted a picture of herself watching the eclipse, and called it "a great reminder that all darkness is temporary."

It's possible, of course, that she was being entirely literal, and that in no way did she intend her remarks to be a thinly-veiled criticism of Trump's divisive presidency and rhetoric. But given Albright's past comments on the president, that seems exceedingly unlikely.

When Trump refused to denounce white supremacist groups in the wake of the fatal violence in Charlottesville, and later insisted that there were some "very fine people" amongst the protesters, Albright said that the president's behavior was "not American," and her criticism didn't end there.

"He is not normal. His reaction to this is not normal. It's not American," Albright told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Wednesday. "I think that what he has done is, obviously, damaged himself, but [also] made people wonder about this moral equivalency, which I just find so stunning given what we know about appeasing fascists and right-wingers is the way to disaster."

For Albright, the first woman to become Secretary of State, this is personal: She and her family fled to America from Czechoslovakia just two weeks after Nazi Germany invaded the country. Tragically, over a dozen of her family members who remained in the country ultimately lost their lives in the Holocaust, according to the Washington Post.

"I've been troubled generally, frankly, about the way that President Trump never talks about democracy, that kind of the values of our foreign policy have not been mentioned, and now we have sunk to this new low in terms of giving a moral equivalency to hatred," Albright said in her interview with Mitchell.

That wasn't the first time Albright denounced Trump. She also chimed in on the administration in July, shortly after the Supreme Court allowed components of the president's travel ban to take effect.

"As an immigrant and refugee, I am offended by the travel ban's cruelty," Albright wrote on Twitter. "As a grandmother, I am insulted by its ignorance." The latter comment was likely a reference to the fact that, under the Trump administration's directives, grandmothers of U.S. citizens were not considered to be close enough family members to warrant exemption from the ban (A federal judge in Hawaii ultimately reversed that directive).

Albright was Secretary of State during President Clinton's second term; before that, she was his Ambassador to the United Nations. In 2006, she consulted the Bush administration on U.S. military policy in Iraq.