Sophia Bush explains why she won’t say Trump’s name: ‘You don’t deserve to be a star’
Sophia Bush (Getty Images)
Sophia Bush says she will not say or write Donald Trump’s name as he “doesn’t really deserve” to have it spoken, comparing the approach to not naming school shooters and instead centring victims.
Speaking to The Hill, the actor and activist said she has made a deliberate choice to avoid using Trump’s name at all.
“I think someone who chooses to exemplify and bolster the very worst of human tendency doesn’t really deserve to have their name spoken,” Bush said.
She compared that decision to the way some people try to shift attention away from perpetrators after mass violence. “It’s the same reason that I think it’s incredibly important to speak the names of school children that are lost in school shootings, and not the name of the school shooter,” she added.
Bush also said: “When you are wreaking terror on a community, I don’t think you deserve to be a star.”
Trump ‘has made things so much worse for women’
Bush said Trump “has made things so much worse for women in the last 10 years,” and described the impact of his leadership in stark terms, saying it was “absolutely abhorrent what’s happening in our country, in our economy, and in our culture right now because of that man’s leadership”, adding that she is “not particularly interested in saying his name”.
She added that she still intends to keep criticising him directly: “But I’ll be one of the voices that continues to call out his bad actions until he’s out of office proudly, because I love my country.”
Bush also said she is currently focused on the midterm elections and supporting Democratic candidates across the country.
What does Bush write in her new book?
In And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes from a Life in Progress, Bush does not mention Trump by name, but writes that he had “won on bluster and wildly crass tendencies” in the 2016 election. She also writes: “Despite running the most qualified person for president to date, misogyny had prevailed at the end of 2016.”
Bush rose to fame as Brooke Davis in One Tree Hill and later starred as Erin Lindsay in Chicago P.D.. She has a long-running public profile as a progressive activist, frequently speaking about gender equality, reproductive rights and US politics.
Earlier this month, Bush spoke about sharing her relationship publicly when she and Ashlyn Harris revealed they had quietly got married in summer 2025, saying they decided to do so because “the visibility piece matters” for young people who still do not feel seen.
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