Media mogul Oprah Winfrey squashed any speculation of a potential 2020 presidential bid in a Wednesday interview on “CBS This Morning.”
“There will be no running for office of any kind for me,” Winfrey said after host Gayle King teased about narrowing her shortlist of vice presidential candidates.
“People ask it all the time,” King said. “Even I am now starting to think the rules have changed about running for president.”
The possibility of a Winfrey run heated up after Donald Trump broke the convention of only career politicians making serious bids for the White House.
But the former talk show host is no stranger to the political arena, often addressing political issues on her eponymous show. And she was an early supporter of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, giving the then-senator a boost in his primary fight against Hillary Clinton.
Her announcement might be a disappointment to some who saw Winfrey as the perfect counter to Trump’s approach of campaigning and playing politics.
New York Post columnist John Podhoretz wrote last month that Winfrey was the “Democrats’ best hope for 2020.”
“If you need to set a thief to catch a thief, you need a star — a grand, outsized, fearless star whom Trump can neither intimidate nor outshine — to catch a star,” he wrote.