Oprah Winfrey For President? Not Interested, Says Talk Show Mogul

Oprah Winfrey says she doesn’t have “the DNA” for a presidential bid, dismissing the possibility of a 2020 run as “not something that interests me,” according to a new magazine profile.

Winfrey spoke to InStyle magazine before her rousing Golden Globes speech – she received the Cecil B. DeMille Award – that some observers heralded as a test of the political waters, but unless she’s changed her mind in the weeks since, taking the Trump challenge isn’t in her cards.

“I’ve always felt very secure and confident with myself in knowing what I could do and what I could not,” Winfrey tells InStyle when asked about Oprah 2020. “And so it’s not something that interests me,” she says. “I don’t have the DNA for it.”

Winfrey told the magazine she saw an “Oprah 2020” mug and thought it was “cute,” and even has met with (an unidentified) someone who offered campaign help, but despite urging by friend and CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King, a run for office is unlikely.

Says Winfrey: “Gayle – who knows me as well as I know myself practically – has been calling me regularly and texting me things, like a woman in the airport saying, ‘When’s Oprah going to run?’ So Gayle sends me these things, and then she’ll go, ‘I know, I know, I know! It wouldn’t be good for you – it would be good for everyone else.’ I met with someone the other day who said that they would help me with a campaign. That’s not for me.”

Winfrey also addresses the sexual harassment allegations that have shaken Hollywood. “Everything that’s happened has brought us to this point in time,” Winfrey says. “We’ve been working our way through a lot of repressed pain, anger, shame, and disappointment. And we weren’t honoring our own voices. Now we’re here, and it took Harvey Weinstein to burst that door wide open. But Harvey [Weinstein] wasn’t the first one. It was Bill Cosby before him, and Bill O’Reilly before him.”

The interview, conducted three weeks before the Golden Globes ceremony and the subsequent mudslides that ravaged her Montecito, California, neighborhood, is in the InStyle issue on newsstands Feb. 9.