(CNN) — Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger shared his frustrations about how “nothing is getting done” in American politics on CNN’s “The Axe Files.”
“I’m very little interested in politics, because it sucks,” he said when asked about President Trump’s choice to focus his midterm platform on the economy, the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and the northward march of migrants in Central America. “I’m more interested in policy.”
Schwarzenegger said he found America’s lack of immigration policy reform and crumbling infrastructure particularly embarrassing. “For 20 years, they have promised to create immigration reform and they haven’t,” he told host David Axelrod. “To me, it’s more important to get the job done rather than … worry about a caravan coming or not.”
According to Schwarzenegger, this stagnation and the United States’ general “atmosphere of extremism” can be traced back to gerrymandering, an
issue he’s publicly spoken out against in recent years. He explained how with gerrymandering, each party is “locked in” to a district and is essentially unbeatable. “When the far right and the far left go to the capitol, be it the state capitol or in Washington, they cannot get together,” he said. Schwarzenegger recently campaigned for redistricting initiatives in Colorado and Michigan.
The movie star also reflected on President Trump’s 2016 victory. “People wanted someone from the outside, people were sick and tired of what was going on in Washington,” he said. “How long can you talk about building more infrastructure in America … all those kind of things, and nothing is happening? People felt like, ‘OK, we need an outsider to bring in, and maybe he can clean house.’ And that’s, I think, what happened.”
While he compared the “outsider” dynamic of President Trump’s campaign to that of his gubernatorial runs in 2003 and 2006, Schwarzenegger, who was born in Austria, cannot make a presidential bid. Yet If he could, he told Axelrod, he “would’ve run.”
“I never go for something that is not going all the way, that’s not my personality,” he said. “But this is the only job that I can’t do. The reason why you don’t hear me complain about that is, because everything that I’ve been able to do was because of America.”
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