Two-time Academy Award-winning actor and Democratic party supporter George Clooney sees Democrats retaking the US House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm elections.
According to Clooney, President Donald Trump has done enough damage to the US economy that it might just be enough to push the mid-terms in the liberals’ favour.
In an interview with Variety published Tuesday, Clooney said he believes a Democratic victory will “check and balance power,” especially following what he described as Trump’s mishandling of the American economy.
“I think we’ll get the House back in a year and a half,” Clooney told the publication.
The 63-year-old stars on Broadway in Good Night, and Good Luck, a theatrical adaptation of the perils of demagoguery and media manipulation, which shares many of Clooney’s own political concerns.
Clooney: GOP leaders are ruining the US economy
Clooney did not hold back in lambasting the current administration, targeting everyone in the GOP, including President Trump. Republicans currently hold a narrow majority in the chamber, with 220 seats compared to 213 for Democrats. Two seats remain vacant, both previously held by Democrats.
According to Clooney, such tight margins are all the liberals need to swing control of the House in the next election cycle.
“We need better representation,” Clooney surmised, addressing fellow Democrats. “We have to find some people to represent us better, who have a sense of humor and who have a purpose.”
Clooney compared the current state of American politics to the turbulence of 1968, a year when Americans were living in civil unrest, political assassinations, and the Vietnam War.
“You’ve been around long enough to remember 1968. Every city in the United States was on fire,” Clooney told his interviewer and Broadway star Patti LuPone. “We’d lost Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. We were losing the greatest speakers we’d ever had. The Vietnam War was raging, the Tet Offensive, everything that was going on at that time in our country.”
Media fragmentation and the illusion of crisis
Clooney argued that the sense of despair today is amplified by the media, which he claimed distorts the severity of the nation’s challenges.
The only thing that’s different is the source of information and how much and how many different sources. But it’s not nearly as violent, even though it feels violent. It’s not nearly as hopeless as it was at that moment in time. And we’ve done this before.
George Clooney
The actor reiterated that America is resilient to even the most dire cases of demagoguery in history.
“From President Jackson to McCarthy to this, the authoritarian, the demagogue, it goes away when they go away, and he will go away,” he added, referring to Trump.
Clooney, one of Hollywood’s most vocal political donors and critics of Trump, had called the president a “New York beast,” and “a guy chasing women” in Manhattan real estate circles before he won the elections in November.
He admitted that Trump’s charisma is a huge part of why he was elected, as the trait is an emblem in modern American politics. Yet, he dismissed the notion that Republicans have a viable successor with comparable star power.
“They don’t have anybody that’s as charismatic as Trump. He’s charismatic. There’s no taking that away from him. He’s a television star,” Clooney said.
Still, the actor is hopeful the country will rediscover its moral footing. “Eventually, we’ll find our better angels like we have every other time,” he concluded.
In another development, Republican lawmakers are privately considering raising tax rates on the wealthiest Americans as provisions of the 2017 tax law approach expiration.
According to CNBC, the discussions are taking place behind closed doors among Senate Republicans.
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