The front of the New York Times Sunday Styles section featured a novelty: One of the paper’s political reporters interviewing that noted expert Cher: “Campaign Sighting: It’s Cher – She is going all out for Hillary Clinton, and her Twitter followers are along for the ride.” From the tone it was clear that NYT’s Jeremy Peters was talking both to a rabid Trump-hating Clinton supporter, and a personal heroine:
Last month, at a rally for Hillary Clinton, Cher colorfully compared Donald Trump to Hitler and Stalin, as fellow “despots.” But Peters ignored that dark link she made to Hitler in favor of reminiscing about the time he dressed up as Cher for a school talent show. He also celebrated a young Cher trashing her own family’s Republican campaign signs and hailed her present “reputation as one of the more effective and entertaining Trump neutralizers on Twitter.”
Cher’s first brush with politics was an act of teenage civil disobedience. It was right before the election of 1960. And she came home one day horrified to discover that her mother and stepfather had festooned their house in Hollywood with Richard Nixon paraphernalia.
Cher purged it all.
First she ripped the Nixon yard signs out of their front lawn. And after her mother fished them out of the garbage and put them back up, Cher found a more permanent solution.
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Fifty-six years later, that is more or less her approach to Donald J. Trump: trash and destroy. These days she wages her battles against the Republican Party not from her lawn -- it’s in Malibu now -- but on her Twitter feed, which she acknowledges is not exactly a model of self-restraint. “If you looked at my tweets, you’d think, ‘She’s crazy,’” she said. (That “craziness” has attracted, at last count, 3.1 million followers.)
In many ways, Cher is the perfect political counterpart to Mr. Trump. Like him, she has always been defiantly indifferent toward her critics. Also like Mr. Trump, no one holds her to the rigid standards of campaign conduct, giving her license to say what she wants without all the consequences. Imagine for a minute that another septuagenarian supporter of Hillary Clinton like Madeleine Albright tweeted side-by-side pictures of John Gotti and Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s recently departed campaign chairman, and offered this critique: “FYI.. Manafort…John Gotti called..he wants his look back!!”
That left a huge opening for Peters to mention the darker turn of Cher’s rhetoric – the “Hitler” reference – but he omitted it.
She has earned a reputation as one of the more effective and entertaining Trump neutralizers on Twitter, largely because she can go toe-to-toe with him both in the sheer volume of tweets she fires off (19,000 and counting) and in her lacerating, no-filter style. She often won’t refer to Mr. Trump by name, for example, but with the toilet emoji. (And that is one of her few jokes that is printable here.)
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She is self-aware enough to know her impetuousness may cause trouble for her and Mrs. Clinton. That is why she sheepishly acknowledged, “I’m trying not to use any bad words.”
Public speaking, she insisted, does not come naturally to her. But anyone who has watched her eulogy to her former husband Sonny Bono has seen that she has a gift for moving audiences.
If this interview seems unnecessarily adulatory, even by the Times fawning standards for celebrity liberals, it may be because Peters rapt admiration for the singer.
I’ve followed her career, the farewells, the reinventions, the public degradation and adulation, for quite a while. When I was in seventh grade, my performance in the talent show was to lip-sync Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe.” I was Cher, dressed in a hip-length black wig and a pair of my mom’s old bell bottoms.
I always thought Cher had a unique voice, and in more than just song.
There was the time in 2003 when she called in to C-Span’s Washington Journal to describe how heartbroken and outraged she was after visiting wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. After the host tried to press this anonymous caller from Miami Beach about her identity -- “an entertainer” was all Cher would volunteer -- her cover was blown. “Is this Cher?” the host asked, sounding stunned.
Peters insisted, despite the evidence, that Cher wasn't really a typical Hollywood liberal:
To pigeonhole her as a Hollywood liberal misses some of the nuance of her politics. She voted for Ross Perot in 1992, which she announced to Larry King on CNN -- once again dialing in but this time not shrouded in anonymity. “I was really nervous, I was really frightened, but my conscience is clear,” she told Mr. Perot, who was a guest of Mr. King’s that night.
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Politics have been at the periphery of Cher’s life since the 1960s. Her first husband would become one of the country’s most famous Republicans: Mr. Bono, who was the mayor of Palm Springs and a congressman for two terms until he died in a skiing accident in 1998.
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Cher’s support for Mrs. Clinton started with her Senate campaign and, later, in 2008 with her unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination against Barack Obama.
The similarities between the two women struck me as something that must have affected Cher. They are just a few years apart in age. Cher is 70. Mrs. Clinton is 68. They both triumphed in male-dominated professions and faced their own career humiliations and rebirths.
But when I asked her about it, she wouldn’t hear it. “I have to stop you right there,” she said. “The fact that she’s a woman does not -- I don’t care.”
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Her reasons for feeling so strongly about Mr. Trump, she said, are maternal: “I know that women can look into the future, the future for their children.”
