THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER:
Author Marianne Williamson has ended her long shot bid for the White House after laying off her whole campaign staff shortly after the new year.
She announced her exit from the race on Friday in a statement titled “With love and gratitude.”
“The primaries might be tightly contested among the top contenders, and I don’t want to get in the way of a progressive candidate winning any of them,” she said.
Williamson, 67, surprised Beltway insiders by leveraging her national profile and 4.1 million social media followers, amassed partly through her previous work as Oprah Winfrey’s spiritual counselor, into more than 130,000 donors and a spot in the first two Democratic National Committee debate rounds.
But the New York Times best-selling writer, who became the most-searched 2020 presidential candidate after the Detroit debate for warning of the Trump administration’s “dark psychic force,” struggled to find establishment support for her quixotic campaign.
While on the trail, Williamson pushed for the creation of a U.S. Department of Peace, which she proposed would also oversee gun control measures and reparations, calling for a $200 billion to $500 billion investment in the African American community over a period of 10 years.
