Madonna on Donald Trump’s Election Win: ‘We’re F–ked’
Madonna has a message for America after Donald Trump‘s presidential win. “We’re fucked,” she told actress Elizabeth Banks in a revealing Billboard interview.
“[The election] felt like someone died,” Madonna says. “[It] felt like a combination of the heartbreak and betrayal you feel when someone you love more than anything leaves you, and also a death. I feel that way every morning; I wake up and say, ‘Oh, wait, Donald Trump is still the president,’ and it wasn’t a bad dream that I had.”
The pop icon also blamed Trump’s victory – and Hillary Clinton’s loss – on women voters, touting the theory that “women hate women.” “It feels like women betrayed us,” she said. “The percentage of women who voted for Trump was insanely high … Women’s nature is not to support other women. It’s really sad. Men protect each other, and women protect their men and children. Women turn inward and men are more external.
“A lot of it has do with jealousy and some sort of tribal inability to accept that one of their kind could lead a nation,” she continued. “Other people just didn’t bother to vote because they didn’t like either candidate, or they didn’t think Trump had a chance in the world. They took their hands off the wheel and then the car crashed.”
Madonna, Billboard‘s Woman of the Year, said she met Trump “years ago” for a Versace campaign at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida – and she found him charming, if unfitting for the presidency.
“He’s a very friendly guy, charismatic in that boastful, macho, alpha-male way,” she said. “I found his political incorrectness amusing. Of course, I didn’t know he was going to be running for president 20 years later. People like that exist in the world, I’m OK with it. They just can’t be heads of state. I just can’t put him and Barack Obama in the same sentence, same room, same job description.”
The singer – who released her 13th LP, Rebel Heart, in 2015 – also spoke out against ageism and sexism in the entertainment industry. “‘Relevance’ is a catchphrase that people throw out because we live in a world full of discrimination,” she said. “Age is only brought up with regard to women. It’s connected to sexism, chauvinism and misogyny. When Leonardo [DiCaprio] is 60 years old, no one is going to talk about his relevance. Am I relevant as a female in this society that hates women? Well, to people who are educated and are not chauvinists or misogynists, yes.”