Veteran filmmaker David Lynch believes President Donald Trump could be remembered as one of the greatest presidents in American history because of the way he has shaken up the political establishment.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Guardian, Lynch admitted to supporting Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary, before supporting Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson in the presidential election. However, he now appears to believe that Trump may have been the right choice.
“I am not really a political person, but I really like the freedom to do what you want to do,” Lynch explained. “[Trump] could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much. No one is able to counter this guy in an intelligent way.”
“Our so-called leaders can’t take the country forward, can’t get anything done,” the Oscar-nominated director said. “Like children, they are. Trump has shown all this.”
David Lynch attends the “Twin Peaks” panel at the Showtime portion of the 2017 Winter Television Critics Association press tour on Monday, Jan. 9, 2017, in Pasadena, Calif. (Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP)
US director David Lynch arrives on May 23, 2017 for the ’70th Anniversary’ ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France. (ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP/Getty Images)
Lynch, whose major works include Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, has in the past expressed admiration for former President Ronald Reagan’s libertarian philosophy. Yet more recently, the 72-year-old identified himself as a Democrat and even endorsed Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election.
“At that time, I thought of myself as a libertarian,” he said in an interview with Reason magazine in 2006. “I believed in next to zero government. And I still would lean toward no government and not so many rules, except for traffic lights and things like this. I really believe in traffic regulations.”
“I’m a Democrat now,” he continued. “And I’ve always been a Democrat, really. But I don’t like the Democrats a lot, either, because I’m a smoker, and I think a lot of the Democrats have come up with these rules for non-smoking. And I don’t think that that’s necessarily so bad, but they have to give the smokers a place.”
Lynch is one of the few Hollywood figures to openly express sympathy or admiration toward President Trump since his rise to the Oval Office. Other major figures to express their support or sympathy towards the Trump agenda include Kanye West, Roseanne Barr, Clint Eastwood, Kid Rock, and Jon Voight.