Lena Dunham talks Trump: “I never truly believed he could win”
Lena Dunham, one of the more vocal celebrities supporting Hillary Clinton, found herself in a state of shock and disbelief following Donald Trump’s victory on Election Day.
The “Girls” star recalls saying, “It wasn’t supposed to go this way” when Donald Trump clinched the presidency, she wrote in an essay for her Lenny website published Friday. The essay marked her first public statement -- aside from a tweet honoring the late Leonard Cohen -- Dunham made since Election Day.
“As horrifying as I found Donald Trump’s rhetoric, as hideous as I found his racism and xenophobia, as threatening to basic decency as I found his demagogue persona, I never truly believed he could win,” she wrote.
But win he did, something that became clearer and clearer on Tuesday night. “The three hours I spent at the Javits Center Tuesday night, surrounded by campaign staffers and fellow surrogates for Hillary Clinton, are blurred and spotty,” Dunham recalled. “At a certain point it became clear something had gone horribly wrong.”
Dunham also looked back on the vitriol and abuse she and other Clinton supporters withstood over the course of her time working for the campaign.
“I received threats and abuse at a level I could not have imagined,” she wrote. “My Twitter mentions went from rude to downright violent. My phone was hacked, and I was sent images of aborted fetuses, weapons. I was called a fat whore, a retard, told I should be killed in front of everyone who knew me.”
“My experience mimics that of so many women who organized for Hillary Clinton and against Donald Trump, most of them not celebrities. We wanted a female president. We wanted guaranteed control over our own bodies. We wanted equal pay. That made us nasty. That made us targets.”
Dunham ended her essay calling for action, for those who opposed Trump to fight back.
“In this new reality, we have all been radicalized. It’s no longer a word for those living on the fringes,” she wrote. “It’s a word for everyone who walks in pain with the results of this election, who feels their identity being crushed under the weight of the half of the country who voted for a man who denounces and denies the basic rights of women, the queer community, immigrants, Muslims, people of color and the differently abled.”
She also offered a message of hope: “We will not be governed by fear. We will show our children a different way. We will go home like shooting stars.”