Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was honored to be asked, but he doesn’t see himself in the White House. The wrestler turned actor revealed he was approached by people from both parties asking him whether he would launch a presidential campaign for 2024.
“I was really blown away, and I was really honored. I’ll share this little bit with you” Johnson said on the first episode of Trevor Noah’s podcast, What Now? “At the end of the year in 2022 I got a visit from the parties asking me if I was going to run, and if I could run”.
The visits were apparently triggered by a 2021 poll where 46% of people said they would vote for The Rock. “It was one after the other, and they brought up that poll, and they also brought up their own deep-dive research that would prove that should I ever go down that road I’d be a contender”, Johnson told Noah. “It was all very surreal because that’s never been my goal. My goal has never been to be in politics. As a matter of fact, there’s a lot about politics that I hate.”
However, it isn’t the first time Johnson has talked about the White House. In 2017 he floated the idea of a possible run. In 2021, he repeated that he would run, f it’s “what the people want.”
In 2022, however, he declared to Tracey Smith’s CBS Sunday Morning that he had decided against it: “It’s off the table”. He said at the time that all his energy was turning to his role as a father: “I love our country and everyone in it. I also love being a daddy” Johnson has three girls, Simone Garcia Johnson, now 22, with his ex-wife Dany Garcia, and two young ones, Jasmine and Tiana, with Lauren Hashian. “I know what it was like to be on the road and be so busy that I was absent for a lot of years in my first daughter’s. So, my number one priority is my daughters. Sure, CEO sounds great. But the number one thing I wanna be is daddy. That’s it.”
Barack Obama, in fact, had two young daughters when he started his political career. And there would be no shortage of precedents of actors turned politicians. Ronald Reagan was an actor before running for governor of California and ultimately arriving as a Republican in the White House. Arnold Schwarzenegger also was a Republican governor of California (he could not have run for the White House because he’s Austria-born). In 2020, however, Johnson gave his support to Joe Biden.
