Walt Disney Company heiress and liberal megadonor Abigail Disney lamented the current state of American politics, arguing civilization needs a “reset.”
Disney spoke to The Guardian about where the Democratic Party currently stands under President Donald Trump’s second term. The liberal heiress of the Disney entertainment empire is no stranger to outspoken opinions. After then-President Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June, she threatened to withhold cash to the Democratic Party until Biden dropped out of the 2024 race.
The megadonor, who said her move at the time was done out of “realism, not disrespect,” offered a grim assessment of America after the Democrats’ defeat in November.
“I spend a lot of time trying to think of reasons to be optimistic, because I don’t know how to function without that. And I want to find the energy and the grit for a really long fight,” she told The Guardian. “This isn’t just four years … you know, there’s a whole civilization-level reset to be done.”
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The interviewer, Guardian reporter John Harris, noted his bewilderment that there aren’t millions of Americans mobilizing in the streets, and Disney suggested a key reason why.
“We could all show up on the streets. But what would be the uniting message?” the heiress asked. “The chaos is deliberate: it’s meant to give us too much to handle. Do we go out there about the environment? Do we go out there about DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion policies]? Do we go out there about gay rights, about women’s rights?”
Disney went on to argue, “You know, the difficulty of being progressive is that it’s difficult to unite everybody around a single issue. So most of the progressives I know are trying to figure that out. And even if we did go out [on the streets], what is our leverage? We have none.”
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Democrats lack leverage, she said, because the political and media landscape has changed dramatically.
“Well, we [Democrats] have a minority in the House and the Senate. We have a cabinet that is so radical, and they are lining the government with people who are beyond radical and there is no place where we can exercise visible dissent … We’re being shut out,” Disney said. “And the way of communicating has completely changed. An op-ed in the New York Times isn’t going to change things.”
Part of the issue, she said, is the implosion of liberal institutions in recent years, “Black associations, neighbourhood associations, PTAs – we need to do the work of rebuilding those spaces. We need the basis of a really vibrant progressive society. We let it die.”
“We need Bernie [Sanders] barnstorming,” Disney added. “We need AOC barnstorming. We need, you know, the people we have that are greeted as authentic in the real world, not focus groups, to go out and be authentic with their passion and their smarts about where to go from here.”
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America, she said, is divided between unwinnable Trump supporters and the rest of the country.
“He has a critical mass of 35% to 40% of the American public – which is far too many people – who are completely on board with the cruelty and the derision and the trolling. But that leaves everybody who’s either too tired, or too alienated or estranged from the process,” Disney suggested. “They’re ours. But we have to do the work.”
Fox News’ Sarah Rumpf-Whitten contributed to this report.
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