Bono doesn’t feel “up to” working with Donald Trump’s administration and thinks the US political climate is very different to how it has been in the past.
Bono doesn’t feel “up to” working with Donald Trump’s administration.
The U2 frontman has always been outspoken and has previously entered discussions with politicians whose views don’t align with his own, including lobbying President George W. Bush about debt relief for developing countries and persuading Republican Senator Jesse Helms to support funding to combat AIDS. While he has been invited to the White House in recent years, he doesn’t think he’d be able to make the controversial US leader or his team listen to what he has to say.
He told The Guardian newspaper: “There’s a permission you need to feel to do a certain task and if you feel it spiritually. You feel like: I think I might be able to help here.
“[With the Trump administration], I have been invited, but I know I’m not up to that, I don’t have the ability to negotiate [with them], it’s too much.
“[I don’t have] a plan, a strategy for successful action, a particular original idea I could get past them. Maybe just leave that to someone else. I don’t feel … the leading, is that the word? That thing where you think you know what to do.”
Last year, the Trump administration disrupted the funding for the AIDS programme Bono had helped initiate, and the Vertigo singer’s bandmate, Larry Mullen Jr., admitted the 66-year-old rocker was left in a state of “complete shock” by the decision.
He said: “When money was taken away from Aids, from people in Africa, I think to be honest you were in a state of complete shock and dismay at what you were seeing. And these things take enormous amounts of time and energy and you can’t do everything, you can only do a certain amount.”
Bono insisted the current political climate in the US is completely different from any previous right-wing administration.
He said: “It’s a new world. This is different. There’s a whiff, there’s a honk, and we’re all just trying to discern it.
“There’s a brand new dance and we do know its name. It’s a little … fascistic. And it needs a different response.”
The Irish rocker recalled a meeting he had with Nobel Prize-winning AI researcher Demis Hassabis, who he regards as “maybe one of the cleverest people on the planet”, about the dangers facing the planet.
He said: “[He suggested that] unless there’s an exponential change in human behaviour and how we get on with each other and how we cooperate and reorganise to face the challenges of the world, like the climate crisis or whatever … we’re in deep trouble”.
Bono doesn’t feel ‘up to’ working with Donald Trump’s administration
