Arnold Schwarzenegger backs Harris and blasts ‘un-American’ Trump

On By Littum

By Allison Detzel

With less than a week until Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris’ list of Republican supporters continues to grow. On Wednesday, the vice president picked up another big endorsement: Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The actor and former Republican governor of California, who rarely offers political endorsements, shared his support for Harris on X. In a lengthy statement, Schwarzenegger, 77, said, “It’s probably not a surprise that I hate politics more than ever,” and acknowledged that, like most Americans, he just wanted to “tune out” this election cycle.

“But I can’t,” he continued, before issuing a scathing rebuke of his party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump: “Because rejecting the outcome of an election is as un-American as it gets. For someone like me, who speaks to people all over the world and still know that America is the shining city on a hill, to call America a garbage can for the world is so unpatriotic, it infuriates me.”

“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 didn’t help anyone else, a candidate who believes that Americans who disagree with him are the bigger enemies than China, Russia or North Korea – it will not solve our problems,” Schwarzenegger wrote.

The former governor, who served from 2003 to 2011, said he will “always be an American before I’m a Republican.”

He urged voters to “close the door on this chapter of history” and said another Trump administration would be “just four more years of bulls—- with no results that make us angrier and angrier, more divided and more hateful.”

Trump and Schwarzenegger, both celebrities who later turned to careers in politics, have sparred in the past. In 2017, after Schwarzenegger replaced Trump as host of NBC’s “Celebrity Apprentice,” the then-president mocked the show’s declining ratings, asks participants at the National Prayer Breakfast to “pray” for the low ratings of his previous TV series.

Schwarzenegger responded by suggesting that the two switch jobs, “You can take over TV—because you’re such a ratings expert—and I’ll take over your job, and people can finally sleep comfortably again.” he said in a video posted on Instagram.

The former governor endorsed former Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the 2016 GOP primary and encouraged him to run again to challenge Trump in 2020.

Schwarzenegger concluded his speech by acknowledging that while he does not agree with the Democratic ticket on politics, he believes they are still the best option for America’s future, “I want to move forward as a country, and while I have plenty of of disagreements with their platform, I think the only way to do it is with Harris and Walz,” he wrote. “Vote this week. Turn around and put this junk behind us.”