Winfrey: A 2020 presidential run ‘would kill me’
Oprah Winfrey is throwing more cold water on the prospect of a 2020 presidential run, telling a magazine that going through the process “would kill me.”
Speculation about a Winfrey challenge to President Donald Trump surged in January after a rousing speech at the Golden Globes awards ceremony, in which she said: “A new day is on the horizon.”
Winfrey, a cultural icon, has talked down the possibility since, but some Democrats continue to stoke the idea of having a global celebrity of their own as a foil to Trump, the reality TV star and media mogul turned Republican president.
Winfrey’s interview in the forthcoming issue of British Vogue should serve to dampen such enthusiasm.
“In that political structure — all the nontruths, the (expletive), the crap, the nastiness, the backhanded backroom stuff that goes on — I feel like I could not exist,” Winfrey, 64, told the publication for a cover story. “I would not be able to do it. It’s not a clean business. It would kill me.”
Winfrey has made some other pretty definite denials of being interested.
In February, she told People magazine that the only thing that could make her run was a signal from above.
“I had people — wealthy, billionaires — calling me up and saying, ‘I can get you a billion dollars. I can run your campaign,”’ Winfrey told the magazine. “That many people saying something made me think, ‘Am I at least supposed to look at the question?’”
Winfrey said she then “went into prayer.”
“‘God, if you think I’m supposed to run, you gotta tell me, and it has to be so clear that not even I can miss it.’ And I haven’t gotten that,” she said.
Around the same time, Winfrey elicited calls of “no” from the audience during a taping of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” when she said she was “definitely not running.”