ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith revealed he has changed his mind on President-elect Donald Trump and regrets voting for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Smith, a long-time sports journalist and host of ESPN’s First Take, told Fox News’s Mark Levin that he doesn’t “like” the fact he voted for Harris back in November after defending her leading up to the election.
“I voted Democrat, and I’ve got to tell you something right now: I don’t like the fact that I did,” Smith said.
“I don’t like what I’m seeing. I don’t want to hear about, ‘Oh we’re about the law. Nobody’s above the law’…but then you go out and you pardon your son, you try to blame everybody else for it,” he added, referring to President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter after he was convicted of three federal gun charges and later pled guilty to tax charges.
“I don’t want to hear about ‘defund the police.’ I don’t want to hear about, you know what this should be, open borders. I don’t want don’t want to hear this stuff,” Smith continued. “I don’t think most of the American people want to hear that.”
Levin asked the ESPN icon if he would hypothetically vote for Trump given a third chance. Smith responded that he wasn’t going to “dismiss that” before explaining why he voted against him in the first place.
“What concerned me about Donald Trump, and the reason I voted against him and voted for Kamala Harris, was because I felt that he would be divisive, that he would create chaos, because he demands such a level of loyalty and fealty to him, and that would take priority over governing our nation,” he said.
“Having said that…if he follows through on some of the things that he has said, it’s not just about eradicating inflation, improving the economy, obviously controlling our borders, these are all things that I care about,” he continued.
“But it can’t be just about fealty to him and loyalty to him. It has to be about getting the job done on behalf of what’s in the best interest of the American people, as opposed to yourself, and not engaging in the kind of juvenile tendencies, tweeting all the time, and going after people who are pretty much irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.”
This comes after Smith told Fox News in October he would vote for most Republicans, but not the president-elect.
“I’d have voted almost for any Republican but him. Nikki Haley. Chris Christie,” Smith told Sean Hannity less than two weeks before the election. “But not him.”
He also slammed Trump’s interview with the Association of Black Journalists over the summer, during which the Republican falsely claimed Harris “happened to turn Black.”
However, Smith found himself publicly apologizing in April after facing heavy criticism for comments he made about Black voters who support Trump.
“A lot of folks in Black America seem pretty pi***d at me right now, from friends and loved ones to colleagues, contemporaries and, dare I say, even the NAACP itself,” Smith said in a video posted to X. “Quite a few folks were put off, if not flat out, offended after my words were interpreted as associating support for Trump from the Black community with all the legal issues he’s facing. For that, I sincerely apologize.”
