Susan Sarandon has doubled down on her anti-Hillary Clinton stance, saying she has no regrets over casting her vote for the Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
The Oscar-winning actress, who was widely criticized after she announced in 2016 that she intended to vote for the third-party candidate amid fears the Green vote was splitting the anti-Trump vote, was asked by an interviewer for British newspaper The Guardian this weekend if she did actually say Clinton would have been a “more dangerous” U.S. president than Trump during the campaign.
Sarandon replied: “Not exactly, but I don’t mind that quote. I did think she was very, very dangerous. We would still be fracking, we would be at war [if she was president]. It wouldn’t be much smoother.”
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The Pentagon recently acknowledged that the United States still has about 11,000 troops in Afghanistan, higher than formally disclosed in recent years, so the U.S. is indeed at war—something Sarandon does not seem to realize.
During the run-up to the 2016 election, Sarandon issued an endorsement letter supporting Stein, stating, “Fear of Donald Trump is not enough for me to support Clinton, with her record of corruption.”
Her backing of Stein was seen by some as letting Trump in through the back door, making her a bête noire among some of her former liberal fan base.
The perceived betrayal of liberal causes was all the harder to stomach given how Sarandon aggressively campaigned for Ralph Nader in the controversial 2000 presidential election.
Now, however, as the Guardian writes: “Liberals in the U.S., it seems, can summon more hatred for Sarandon right now than they can for Paul Ryan.”
Sarandon also criticized President Obama’s administration in the interview when asked about the Trump administration’s approach to immigration policy, particularly with regard to young, undocumented DREAMers. “[Hillary] would’ve done it the way Obama did it. Which was sneakily. He deported more people than have been deported now. How he got the Nobel Peace Prize I don’t know.”
The Thelma & Louise star also weighed in on the Harvey Weinstein fallout, saying: “There’s just a culture, starting in the ’60s and ’70s, where there was a certain amount of liberation that made it possible for those things to happen without even seeing yourself as a victim.”
Sarandon adds: “Certainly, I experienced both having people come on to me and being told that I wasn’t interesting enough to get a part, or sexual enough, once they found out I was married,” she says.
“In my case, I just said no, in many clumsy, stupid ways, but the people didn’t push on. They didn’t show up in my room. They didn’t corner me, or batter me, or get on top of me. It was an invitation: ‘Yeah, why don’t you spend the night now that you’re here in the middle of nowhere on location?’ And I said: ‘No, I gotta get back to my room.’ But I didn’t feel super offended, because it wasn’t a thing that became super difficult.”
Sarandon suggests that the Democratic Party will continue to lose elections if it continues to be in ‘denial’ about the real reasons [it] lost, saying: “I mean it’s very flattering to think that I, on my own, cost the election. That my little voice was the deciding factor... I didn’t advocate people voting for anything. I said get your information, I’m going to vote for change, because I was hoping that Stein was going to get whatever percentage she needed—but I knew she wasn’t going to make the difference in the election.”
