Oprah Says No To Presidential Run

Thanks, but no thanks. After a rousing speech at the Golden Globe Awards when she received the Cecil B. DeMille Award, many claimed she was testing the political waters for a presidential run in 2020.

The response was overwhelming, with many on social media calling for her to run. (President Trump meanwhile, predicted she wouldn’t, and said he “loved” her). But according to a new interview with InStyle, President Oprah just isn’t meant to be.

• “I’ve always felt very secure and confident with myself in knowing what I could do and what I could not,” Winfrey tells InStyle when asked about Oprah 2020. “And so it’s not something that interests me. I don’t have the DNA for it.”
• Winfrey even cops to meeting with an unidentified person who offered to help with a campaign, and admits that she and her BFF Gayle King frequently discuss it.
• Says Winfrey: “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.”
• Something else that isn’t for Winfrey, now that she’s 63? “You take no s-. None. Not a bit. In your 40s you want to say you take no s-, but you still do. In your 60s you take none. There’s both a quickening and a calming – there’s a sense that you don’t have as much time on earth as you once did. For me, there’s also a sense of calming about that.”
• Winfrey also discussed the #MeToo movement. “Everything that’s happened has brought us to this point in time,” Winfrey says. “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.”
• The interview did take place before the Golden Globes speech, so some seem to be holding out hope that she changed her mind in the ensuing weeks. InStyle hits newsstands