Oprah Winfrey Not Interested In Running For President

In an interview with InStyle magazine, Oprah Winfrey said she has no interest in running for President of the United States in 2020. Several people were calling for her to run after her speech at the Golden Globe Awards earlier this month. Here are highlights:

On the #MeToo movement: “Everything that’s happened has brought us to this point in time. We’ve been working our way through a lot of repressed pain, anger, shame, and disappointment. And we weren’t honoring our own voices. Now we’re here, and it took Harvey Weinstein* to burst that door wide open. But Harvey wasn’t the first one. It was Bill Cosby before him, and Bill O’Reilly before him. It’s just fascinating to me because I always try to look at things from thousands of feet above. In a macro way, like, “What’s really going on here?” Well, if it had only been Harvey Weinstein in that moment, it probably wouldn’t have happened. But it compounded, and people are hearing it. Finally everyone has to start paying attention. It’s cracked open. It takes a lot for people to wake up and see things differently than they’ve seen them before. I remember in the early days when I first started doing shows about missing children, we couldn’t get mothers to watch because it was too much and they didn’t want to believe it could happen to them. It’s only after it reaches enough people that you open yourself up enough to think, ‘Hmm, there’s a possibility that this thing could happen to me too.'”

On what happens next: “It has seared into the consciousness a level of awareness that was not there before. That’s the most important thing to me. When Reese Witherspoon can tell her story at the same time as a farm worker in Iowa or a factory worker in Alabama, it says to a person, “Oh well, I’ve been putting up with that asshole supervisor for all these years. Maybe it’s time for me to do something too.” You can see you’re not alone. We don’t have to turn our heads to pretend something isn’t happening in order to keep going. And now we have amongst ourselves actresses, producers, directors, and people in business discussing how we can create a reporting system so that everybody feels supported.”

On if she will run for President: “I actually saw a mug the other day … I thought it was a cute mug. All you need is a mug and some campaign literature and a T-shirt. I’ve always felt very secure and confident with myself in knowing what I could do and what I could not. And so it’s not something that interests me. I don’t have the DNA for it. Gayle—who knows me as well as I know myself practically—has been calling me regularly and texting me things, like a woman in the airport saying, “When’s Oprah going to run?” So Gayle sends me these things, and then she’ll go, “I know, I know, I know! It wouldn’t be good for you—it would be good for everyone else.” I met with someone the other day who said that they would help me with a campaign. That’s not for me.”