Arnold Schwarzenegger backs Kamala Harris: ‘I’ll always be an American before I’m a Republican’ | Arnold Schwarzenegger

Former Republican governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced his support for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in next week’s election.

In a lengthy 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 will always be an American before I am a Republican,” he wrote. “That’s why this week I’m 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 the way I do. You don’t recognize our country. And you’re right to be furious.”

Schwarzenegger, who stopped acting between 2003 and 2011 while serving in California, went on to write that he was disappointed by all those in power in the United States over the past decades who have discussed addressing the national debt and “our broken immigration system” yet to do so. This continued during the election campaign, he said, as politicians prefer “to have talking points” in elections rather than perform “the public service that will make the lives of Americans better.” “

“It’s fair game for them. But it’s life for my fellow Americans. We should be mad,” Schwarzenegger wrote. “But a candidate who won’t respect your vote unless it’s for him, a candidate who will send his supporters to storm the Capitol while he watches with a Diet Coke, a candidate who has shown no ability to work to pass any policy other than a tax cut that helped his donors and other rich people like me, but who didn’t help anyone else, a candidate who believes Americans who disagree with him are 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 nominee. Schwarzenegger compared the January 6 attack on the Capitol to 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 “dismissing the outcome of an election is as un-American as it gets. For someone like me who talks to people all over the world and still knows that America is the shining city on a hill, it is so unpatriotic to call America (a) garbage can to the world, it infuriates me.”

If Trump were to be re-elected, he said, “it’s just going to be four more years of bullshit with no results that make us angrier and angrier, more divided and more hateful. We have to close the door on this chapter of American history, and I know former President Trump will not do that.”

“I want to move forward as a country,” he concluded, “and while I have plenty of disagreements with their platform, I think the only way to do that is with Harris and Walz.”