The former Republican governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced that he is backing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in next week’s election.
In a long post on X, Schwarzenegger, 77, said that while he doesn’t “really do endorsements” … “hate[s] politics” and doesn’t “trust most politicians”, he felt compelled to formally endorse Harris and her pick for vice president Tim Walz.
I don’t really do endorsements. I’m not shy about sharing my views, but I hate politics and don’t trust most politicians.
I also understand that people want to hear from me because I am not just a celebrity, I am a former Republican Governor.
My time as Governor taught me to…
— Arnold (@Schwarzenegger) October 30, 2024
“I will always be an American before I am a Republican,” he wrote. “That’s why, this week, I am voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I’m sharing it with all of you because I think there are a lot of you who feel like I do. You don’t recognise our country. And you are right to be furious.”
Schwarzenegger, who quit acting between 2003 and 2011 while he served in California, continued by writing that he was disappointed in all those who have been in power in the US over the past decades who have discussed addressing the national debt and “our broken immigration system” yet not managing to do so. This continued during election campaigning, he said, as politicians prefer “having talking points” for elections rather than performing “the public service that will make Americans’ lives better.”
“It is a just game to them. But it is life for my fellow Americans. We should be pissed,” Schwarzenegger wrote. “But a candidate who won’t respect your vote unless it is for him, a candidate who will send his followers to storm the Capitol while he watches with a Diet Coke, a candidate who has shown no ability to work to pass any policy besides a tax cut that helped his donors and other rich people like me but helped no one else else, a candidate who thinks Americans who disagree with him are the bigger enemies than China, Russia, or North Korea – that won’t solve our problems.”
Schwarzenegger, who replaced Donald Trump as host of The New Celebrity Apprentice in 2016, has long been an outspoken critic of the former president and current Republican candidate. Schwarzenegger likened the 6 January attack on the Capitol to the Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany and described Trump as “a failed leader. He will go down in history as the worst president ever.”
He returned to the aftermath of the 2020 election on X, saying that “rejecting the results of an election is as un-American as it gets. To someone like me who talks to people all over the world and still knows America is the shining city on a hill, calling America [a] trash can for the world is so unpatriotic, it makes me furious.”
Were Trump to be re-elected, he said, “it will just be four more years of bullshit with no results that makes us angrier and angrier, more divided, and more hateful. We need to close the door on this chapter of American history, and I know that former President Trump won’t do that.”
“I want to move forward as a country,” he concluded, “and even though I have plenty of disagreements with their platform, I think the only way to do that is with Harris and Walz.”