It’s no surprise that this actor Dennis Quaid has spoken out in support Donald Trump’s continued attempt to return to the White House. What’s surprising is that the Texan came so close to portray the former president George W Bush has turned his back on the 43rd president in a high-profile TV series, saying he prefers Trump to the two-term president from 2001-2009.

The announcement came Saturday, after Quaid took the stage at Trump’s rally in California’s Coachella Valley. During the meeting, Quaid said, speaking hesitantly Piers Morgan in May: “I personally think I will vote for (Trump) in the next election,” and that “I was ready not to vote for Trump… but I saw a weaponization of our justice system.”

“Trump is probably the most scrutinized person in the history of the world,” the actor continued. “And they couldn’t actually get him to do anything.”

Quaid was proven wrong a few days later, when a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of 34 felonies for falsifying company records; even before that, the former president had lost a number of civil cases, including one in which a jury found him guilty of sexually assaulting and defaming his accuser, E. Jean Carroll.

When Morgan asked, “Do you have to like Trump to vote for him,” Quaid was more emphatic. “No,” he replied quickly. “During the last campaign, in ’16 and ’20, I said to myself, ‘Oh, please don’t do that.’ Please don’t say that.’ These things will come out of his mouth.”

“People might call him an asshole,” Quaid said. “But he’s my asshole.”

In recent months, however, it seems that Trump has been promoted from Dennis Quaid’s asshole to Dennis Quaid’s favorite president… since the year 2000, at least. After taking the stage Saturday at the former president’s campaign event, Quaid said Trump is “My Favorite President of the 21st Century,” a pitch that also Bill Clintonwho left office in 2001 and who portrayed Quaid in the 2010 film The special relationshipabout Tony Blair’s ties to Clinton and George W. Bush. (The New York Times called Quaid’s turn ‘dazzling’.)

It also includes Bush, for whom Quaid was cast Ryan Murphy‘failed Katrina: American Crime Story (a Quaid-free portion of which was eventually reused in the Apple TV series Five Days at Memorial) And there are Barack Obamawho endorsed Quaid in 2008 and subsequently called Obama “the Superman for everyone.”

But Superman is apparently lower than asshole, at least in Quaid’s eyes. At Saturday’s event, Quaid announced, “You know, I’m an actor and I just had this movie come out, it was a famous last name: Reagan. My favorite president of the 20th century.”

“We were a country in decline. That’s what they told us. Ronald Reagan came along and said, no, we are not a country in decline. We’re going there. And we followed him. Same with Trump. With President Trump. My favorite president of the 21st century.”

A strange statement, to say the least, as it is Trump who has repeatedly heralded an American decline, even saying at a meeting in August: “I use the term, often in closing: ‘We are a nation in decline. We are a failed nation.” And I think it’s a beautiful sentence.” Meanwhile, Democratic candidate and current Vice President Kamala Harris disputes this characterization, saying instead that the country is about to “write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.”

Taken together with the rest of Quaid’s speech, you have to wonder if he understood who he was campaigning for. “I’m here today to tell you that it’s time to choose a side,” the actor began. “Are we going to be a nation that stands for the Constitution or for TikTok?” he asked, an apparent reference to the social media platform that politicians on both sides of the aisle have tried to ban.

That ban, that president Joe Biden signed into law, makes Quaid’s bipartisan assessment a little harder to understand, especially given Trump’s 2020 statements calling for an “an end to all rules, regulations and articles, even those in the Constitution.” Meanwhile, Trump proudly announced in July, “I’m for TikTok” as the ban progressed.

So when Quaid says, “It’s time to pick a side,” did he really mean the side of the man who thinks a country going backwards is “beautiful,” and that TikTok deserves more public support than the Constitution ? Or maybe he – like his favorite president of the last century – is simply confused.