Arnold Schwarzenegger has an interesting relationship with his beloved Republican party these days. He’s been a proud member of the GOP ever since he came to America, but he openly declared last year that he would not vote for Donald Trump in the presidential election. Since then, Schwarzenegger has shown a bit more willingness to back Trump’s policies, suggesting that the original Muslim ban’s problem was that it was “hasty” (and not that it was racist), but Trump still inexplicably feels the need to get into little feuds with him. He’s been sniping at Schwarzenegger over the low ratings of the new Celebrity Apprentice for a while, and when Schwarzenegger announced that he would be leaving the show, Trump felt the need to get on Twitter and claim that Schwarzenegger had actually been fired—a claim that Schwarzenegger emphatically denied with a fiery tweet of his own.
Today, though, in an interview with Michael Smerconish’s SiriusXM radio show, Schwarzenegger offered a theory as to why Trump is so obsessed with him, saying: “I think he’s in love with me.” Clearly unsure if Schwarzenegger was joking, Smerconish tried to get him to budge by asking follow-up questions, but Schwarzenegger just let the comment hang there until Smerconish wrapped up the interview. It’s a weird moment, and you can hear it for yourself below.
Even weirder, though, is the fact that it might not be the weirdest thing in the interview. Before Smerconish ever brings up Trump, Schwarzenegger spends several minutes talking about how much he dislikes the current Republican trend of merciless gerrymandering, which he notes is the reason why members of Congress keep getting reelected even though they’re wildly unpopular. Because of this, politicians end up serving their party instead of their constituents, which ends up betraying the entire point of a democracy. It’s a solid point that definitely goes against his party’s current core beliefs (“Republicans good, democracy bad”), and it kind of makes you wonder what would happen if more people in the GOP started thinking like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
We live in very strange times.