Lin-Manuel Miranda: Donald Trump Makes Me ‘Sick to My Stomach’

Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda criticized Donald Trump as unfit for the presidency in a new interview with Variety. “He earned my contempt with his comments on John McCain, and his doubling down on the Gold Star family just made me sick to my stomach,” Miranda asserted, referring to Trump’s war of words with the Khan family that followed Khizr Khan’s moving speech earlier this year at the Democratic National Convention. “It made me sick to my stomach that a candidate, who is seen by the rest of the world, is going after a military family,” Miranda added. 

“There’s no excuse for it,” he continued. “And his defense: ‘I was attacked?’ What do you think is going to happen when you’re president? If you can’t handle a speech, how are you going to handle aggression from another country? That really scared a lot of people, and it scared me.”

Miranda revised his earlier opinion on Trump in light of the aforementioned incidents. “I got interviewed a year ago, and I said he was ‘an annoyance gone national’ – that was very early in the primary,” he remembered. “I think we’ve long since crossed that line.”

According to Variety, Miranda has also produced three advertisements to encourage voter turnout. “My goal is to get everyone voting as much as possible,” he noted, “because you don’t want 40 percent of the nation to decide who our president is. You want a majority. You want a mandate. You want to hear the will of the electorate. Whether that breaks with my personal interest or not, it is in the interest of the common good for as many people to show up as possible.”

In July, Miranda added an extra matinee performance of his hit musical Hamilton to raise money for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.