At the 2012 Republican National Convention—the place where America formally met a plucky young boy named Mitt Romney and walked away thoroughly unimpressed—Clint Eastwood stole the show by making a totally bizarre speech involving an empty chair that was meant to represent President Obama. It was, in a word, bananas.
Weirdly, though, Eastwood was nowhere to be seen at the 2016 Republican National Convention, even though his “empty chair” shtick wouldn’t have been nearly as ridiculous as some of the other stuff that went down that week. Thankfully, Esquire sat down with Eastwood and picked his brain about both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, so now we don’t need to wonder where he stands on the coming election. Naturally, he seems to prefer Donald Trump.
Eastwood says that Trump is “onto something,” with that something being that “secretly everybody’s getting tired of political correctness.” He says we’re living in a “pussy generation” now because “everybody’s walking on eggshells” and “accusing people of being racist.” Eastwood admits that Trump has “said a lot of dumb things,” but when he was a kid, “those things weren’t called racist,” so everybody just needs to stop making a big deal out of these dumb things and “fucking get over it.”
Despite all of that, Eastwood doesn’t seem like a huge fan of Trump in general, but he’d still never support Clinton. He says she’d be “a tough voice to listen to for four years,” adding that he doesn’t like that she’s going to maintain a lot of Obama’s policies. Mostly, though, he doesn’t like that she has “made a lot of dough out of being a politician,” which is something that he doesn’t think Ronald Reagan ever would’ve done. (He doesn’t say anything about how much dough Donald Trump has made in his year or so as a politician.)
Aside from Trump, one of the recurring themes in the interview is that Eastwood really hates the idea of welfare and what he sees as people getting something for nothing. This comes up in a big way in a story he tells from his youth about a guy who showed up at his family’s backdoor and offered to chop up some wood in exchange for a sandwich. Eastwood’s eyes “well up” when he talks about this, and he says he thinks about it a lot when he sees “all the assholes out there who are complaining” because this man was doing whatever he could to get “the bare necessities to exist.” Again, though, he hates the idea of welfare and people being given handouts when they’re in need.
The whole interview is ostensibly about Eastwood and his son, Scott, who is trying to put together a film career of his own these days. His only interjection in the political talk, though, is to point out that—while his dad doesn’t approve of the pussy generation—he is decidedly “pro-pussy.”