Shania Twain has publicly apologized for telling a reporter that she would’ve supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, were she allowed to vote. The “Man! I Feel Like A Woman” singer is Canadian.
Twain told The Guardian, in an interview published Sunday, that she preferred Trump because of his “honesty”:
I would have voted for him because, even though he was offensive, he seemed honest. Do you want straight or polite? Not that you shouldn’t be able to have both. If I were voting, I just don’t want bullshit. I would have voted for a feeling that it was transparent. And politics has a reputation of not being that, right?
The country icon qualified and apologized for her comments Sunday night in a statement posted on social media. Twain swears she does not endorse Trump—who, admittedly, is very honest about his loathing of women and minorities—but was simply making a point about Hillary Clinton being unrelatable, or something:
I would like to apologise to anybody I have offended in a recent interview with the Guardian relating to the American President. The question caught me off guard. As a Canadian, I regret answering this unexpected question without giving my response more context (1/4)
— Shania Twain (@ShaniaTwain) April 22, 2018
“I was trying to explain,” Twain wrote, “in response to a question about the election, that my limited understanding was that the President talked to a portion of America like an accessible person they could relate to, as he was NOT a politician.”
Twain embarks in May on her first tour since 2002, following the September release of her comeback album Now. Elsewhere in the conversation, she is vulnerable and reflective about her abusive childhood, and her years removed from an industry she once dominated, a hiatus during which she stopped performing for seven years, survived a nasty high-profile divorce, re-married, published a memoir, cameo’d in Broad City, and eventually started writing music again. (Twain wrote and produced every song on her latest album.)
Here’s some slightly more fun content from the interview about Twain’s enthusiasm for calling the ex-friend who slept with her ex-husband a “cunt.”
“If I’m really angry, I’ll say ‘fuck’ a lot. And, if I’m writing, that word will be in every line. There was one song I wrote about my cheating friend and there was a lot of fucks in there. I hated her, so that’s the best word to use when you hate somebody.”
… “‘Cunt’ is good, too. My friend said: ‘Say: “She’s a fucking cunt”’. That felt good to say. Those words were cathartic.”
The Trump stuff, though, that’s bad. If only it was surprising.