Anthony Mackie Unendorses Donald Trump, Claims He Was Just Kidding
Actor Anthony Mackie has backpedaled on his endorsement of Donald Trump for president after a huge backlash on social media.
He now claims the endorsement which blew up Twitter was all just a joke, a bad one at that.
The Captain America and Avengers star abruptly jumped off the the GOP front-runner’s bandwagon after his pro-Trump remarks in a BET interview went viral.
Mackie sat down with BET yesterday as part of the ongoing promotion of his new movie with Sandra Bullock, called Our Brand is Crisis, in which he plays a campaign manager, and which is how politics worked its way into the interview. In the context of the movie role, Mackie provided this answer about which real-life campaign as between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump that he would like to run, at least on a theoretical basis.
“I would 100 percent like to run Trump’s campaign… first, that would be the best party ever when he won, and second, Trump’s an easy sell … if you look at Trump, he’s an easy sell because you can sell him as the guy who worked his way up from nothing… the pull yourself up by your bootstraps candidate, people would identify with that.”
As far as a Trump endorsement, Mackie added that “I’m on the bandwagon; I’m drinking the Kool-Aid.”
Our Brand is Crisis premieres in theaters on October 30.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXH0uo3oEw4
Parenthetically, Donald Trump’s father was actually a wealthy real estate developer in his own right (although never achieving the magnitude of his son), so the Donald Trump narrative would hardly qualify as a rags-to-riches story.
Perhaps owing to career or peer pressure, the controversy over the Trump endorsement prompted Mackie to subsequently issue the following tweet yesterday afternoon.
Sorry Donald, that wasn’t an endorsement. Just a bad attempt at a joke, I guess?
— Anthony Mackie (@AnthonyMackie) October 19, 2015
Perhaps as a further attempt at damage control, Anthony Mackie remarked in a subsequent interview that the Republican Party is an absolute mess, based on how the GOP debates unfolded, and praised the substantive nature of the Democrat presidential debate that was aired last week on CNN. That may have been a function of the questions posed by the moderators, however, which in both GOP debates pitted one candidate against the other rather than focusing on policy.
Breitbart News reports that Anthony Mackie has expressed other politically incorrect views in the past. “Mackie is no stranger to controversy. The star has been criticized this year for saying he encourages his nephew to avoid groupthink and refrain from wearing dreadlocks, in regards to acts of police violence and black males.” He also spoken in favor of traditional gender roles in a relationship, according to the Daily Beast.
In general, there seems to be an expectation on social media and in the mainstream media that Hollywood celebrities only support Democrats and liberal progressives for political office. Self-described Democrat Kirstie Alley, the former Cheers star, recently disclosed on Twitter, however, that she wouldn’t be voting for the party that starts with the letters D-E-M, which means she appears to going against the tide among her entertainment industry colleagues. Her political tweets prompted a similar blowback on social media.
Separately, new polling data, if accurate, supposedly reveals that blue-collar and union workers are supporting Donald Trump — who has vowed to bring jobs back to America from overseas — in a big way.
Which statement do you think reflects Anthony Mackie’s true feelings about the Donald Trump presidential candidacy: the endorsement or the follow-up unendorsement?
Should stars and celebrities make political endorsements of any kind in the first place?
[Photos by Alberto E. Rodriguez, Jason Kempin, and Jason Merritt/Getty Images]
