Arnold Schwarzenegger announced Wednesday that he’ll be voting for Kamala Harris in the presidential election.
The Republican former governor of California said in a statement that he doesn’t “really do endorsements,” explaining that he doesn’t trust most politicians, currently hates politics more than ever, and would like to simply “tune out.”
“But I can’t,” the 77-year-old wrote. “Because 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 is a [sic] trash can for the world is so unpatriotic, it makes me furious.”
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“I will always be an American before I am a Republican,” Schwarzenegger continued. “That’s why, this week, I am voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.”
Schwarzenegger acknowledged that he doesn’t “like either party right now,” calling out Republicans for boosting deficits and expressing concern about Democratic policies leading to more crime in cities. He said that Americans “should be p---ed!”
“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 wrote.
A Trump victory, he added, would “four more years of bulls--t 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,” Schwarzenegger wrote. “He will divide, he will insult, he will find new ways to be more un-American than he already has been, and we, the people, will get nothing but more anger.”
“I want to move forward as a country, and even though I have plenty of disagreements with their platform, I think the only way to do that is with Harris and Walz,” he concluded, advising voters to vote even if they disagree with him.
Schwarzenegger said last November that he viewed Trump and President Joe Biden as “both flawed” and that the country needed to “find new leaders.” In 2019, he said he doubted he would vote for Trump in the 2020 election, and outright declared he wouldn’t vote for Trump on the eve of the 2016 election.
“For the first time since I became a citizen in 1983, I will not vote for the Republican candidate for president,” Schwarzenegger announced at the time.
Schwarzenegger and Trump have previously taken shots at each other in public. Trump has mocked the actor’s short-lived stint hosting The Celebrity Apprentice in 2017, claiming in one tweet that year that Schwarzenegger “did a really bad job as Governor of California and even worse on the Apprentice...but at least he tried hard!”
