Cherie DeVille Abandons 2020 Presidential Run

LOS ANGELES—Presidential candidates come and presidential candidates go, and even though it's still about 22 months from the 2020 election, at least a dozen candidates, mostly Democrats, have already announced that they intend to challenge Donald "Grab 'Em by the Pussy" Trump for the highest elected office in the land, while several others who were expected to be contenders have announced that they won't in fact be running. However, one candidate who was among the very first to announce her candidacy for president, adult actress Cherie DeVille, declared at the end of January that she is dropping out of the race. DeVille announced her candidacy on YouTube in late August of 2017, choosing popular rapper Coolio as her running mate, and declaring that her campaign slogan would be "Make America Fucking Awesome Again." Though DeVille considered running as a Democrat, she eventually decided to go the Independent route after talking with Reform and Libertarian party leaders. But since her announcement, DeVille received virtually no public support, failed to attract investors in her campaign, and lost her running mate Coolio for reasons not disclosed. "When I began the campaign and was building up speed, I really had hopes that this would actually happen for me,” DeVille told the ultra-conservative Washington Examiner after she'd decided to end her campaign. “Maybe as the cultural climate changes, I can try again." DeVille also stated that she'd received a lot of blowback from people who held her profession as a pornographic actress against her. "If we step out of our lane as—pardon my language—whores, now we are a problem and people don’t like it, in a way that I didn’t understand," she told the Examiner. "People with those feelings about pornography are very serious, very serious about how they feel." Among DeVille's policy positions were support for government-enforced net neutrality, limiting gun ownership, free college tuition for all, and nationwide legalization of marijuana—views mostly shared by one of her political idols, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. However, one thing DeVille thinks she did accomplish with her candidacy was raising the public profile of adult performers. "Even if it only showed five people that pornographers are real people with vast interests ... then it was worth it for me," she said.