Stephen King has offered his thoughts on the current political situation in the US, claiming it’s “easy to overestimate” the rise of fascism.
The Carrie author has been an outspoken critic of the Republican party in recent years, and particularly of former president Donald Trump.
In an interview with TV presenter and novelist Richard Osman for The SundayTimes, King said: “There is a strong right wing, a political right wing in America, and they have a megaphone in some of the media.
“They’re not fascists but they’re hard right-wingers,” he continued. “They’re certainly climate change deniers, so that is a real problem. But, again, it’s the stuff that’s crazy like QAnon that gets the press. You have to remember that Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by three million votes [in the popular vote] and that Biden beat Trump by seven million votes.”
King went on to claim that he thought “most people” were fundamentally well-intentioned, regardless of political affiliations.
“I happen to think that Trump was a horrible president and is a horrible person,” he said. “I think he actually engaged in criminal behaviour and, certainly, I felt that he was a sociopath who tried to overturn the American democracy not out of any political wish of his own but because he could not admit that he had lost.
“So, I don’t really understand the people who continue to support him, but I do understand that a guy driving a pickup truck covered with Trump and NRA stickers – you know, ‘take my rifle when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers’ – would stop and pick up a stranger if he was in a rainstorm and say: ‘Where you going, buddy?’”
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort was recently the subject of an FBI raid, with the ex-president now facing a new wave of legal scrutiny. Follow the latest updates here.
