Bestselling author Stephen King is “disappointed” in the country that propelled Donald Trump’s rise to claim the Republican presidential nomination.
In an interview with Rolling Stone this week, the 68-year-old author weighed in on Trump’s meteoric political ascent and his belief that presumptive Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton is the only candidate “remotely qualified” to handle the country’s top job.
“I am very disappointed in the country,” King told Rolling Stone of Trump’s apparent popularity. “I think that he’s sort of the last stand of a sort of American male who feels like women have gotten out of their place and they’re letting in all these people that have the wrong skin colors. He speaks to those people.”
“Trump is extremely popular because people would like to have a world where you just didn’t question that the white American was at the top of the pecking order,” he added.
King had made his displeasure with Trump known before; in May, he joined hundreds of other authors in signing an open letter “unequivocally” opposing the billionaire real estate magnate’s presidential candidacy.
The horror author has also attacked Trump and his supporters on social media, tweeting in December that the thought of people voting “for this rabid coyote leaves me speechless.”
King told Rolling Stone that Trump’s rise to the top of the Republican ticket can be traced back to the early days of his campaign, when pundits and media outlets dismissed him as a joke.
“I saw a poll the other day that said, Hillary Clinton is only leading him by three points. If that’s true, you have to go back to that time when he rode that escalator down and announced the presidency, and everyone thought that it was a joke,” King said. “Rolling Stone thought he was a joke. Jon Stewart said, ‘Oh please, let him continue to run; he’s the best joke material that we’ve had.’ Well, nobody is laughing anymore.”
Of his own presidential preference, King made it clear that of all the candidates in this year’s race, “the only one who is remotely qualified to do the job is Hillary Clinton.”
“There’s a lot of prejudice against her, just because she’s a woman,” the author explained. “Having been raised by a woman and lived in a family where my wife has, like, six sisters, I hate that.”
Read the rest of King’s interview with Rolling Stone here.
Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum
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