Sorry to burst your “Oprah 2020” bubble! Oprah Winfrey dismissed the idea of a potential presidential run in an interview given weeks before her rousing speech at the Golden Globes.
“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,” Winfrey told InStyle editor-in-chief Laura Brown in an interview published Thursday. “I don’t have the DNA for it.”
“Gayle [King] — 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?’” Winfrey added. “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.”
Winfrey gave the interview three weeks before she accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award and had the crowd of Hollywood elite on their feet.
When Globes host Seth Meyers had already made a reference to her running with Tom Hanks as her vice president during his opening monologue, Winfrey was seen laughing off the idea of a bid.
But her partner Stedman Graham chimed in to say, “It’s up to the people. She would absolutely do it.”
Ever since, the idea of an Oprah presidential campaign has been gaining momentum, with President Trump himself telling reporters, “Yeah, I’ll beat Oprah. Oprah would be a lot of fun,” adding that he knows her “very well.” “I like Oprah. I don’t think she’s going to run,” Trump said.