The 84-year-old folk legend told The Guardian he's considering leaving the country over President Trump's policies, adding his name to a roster of wealthy entertainers who have fled or threatened to flee since the 2024 election.

Art Garfunkel, the New York City-born singer who spent six decades as half of one of America's most famous musical duos, said in a September 4 interview with The Guardian that he no longer supports the direction of the country under President Trump.

"I don't like America's position at all. I'm not aboard, and I'm thinking of leaving the country, frankly," Garfunkel told the British publication. He cited climate change, global hunger, and Trump's foreign policy as reasons for his discontent.

Garfunkel singled out the U.S. military operation that resulted in the capture of then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who now sits in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn facing a slew of federal charges. The singer framed the operation as a violation of international norms.

"When Donald Trump took over Venezuela, are those the new rules? Just take over a country and run it?"

Garfunkel said in the same interview. He added that the situation was "shocking" but expressed a measure of hope: "Trump won't last forever, so we've got to hope."

Fox News Digital reported that it reached out to Garfunkel for additional comment. No response was noted in the report.

Garfunkel joins O'Donnell, DeGeneres, and Cameron on the exit list

Garfunkel is not the first celebrity to announce, or at least float, a departure from the United States since Trump's 2024 election victory. Comedian Rosie O'Donnell, 64, actually followed through. She relocated to Ireland after the election and returned to the U.S. only briefly in August for a weeklong guest-hosting stint on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!"

On the August 17 episode, O'Donnell told the audience she had read Project 2025 and decided to leave:

"I read that Project 2025 and said, 'Got to get myself out of here, you know,' and I decided to go to Ireland, a place where people are driven to drink regardless of who's running their country."

She then returned her attention to her new life abroad.

Former daytime talk show host Ellen DeGeneres and her wife, Portia de Rossi, made a similar move. The couple had arrived in the United Kingdom the day before the 2024 election. In a 2025 interview with BBC broadcaster Richard Bacon, DeGeneres described the moment they decided to stay permanently.

"We got here the day before the election and woke up to lots of texts from our friends with crying emojis, and I was like, 'He got in.' And we're like, 'We're staying here.'"

Director James Cameron, meanwhile, has long planned a permanent move to New Zealand and has publicly criticized Trump as his New Zealand citizenship approached.

The pattern is consistent: wealthy, famous Americans who opposed Trump at the ballot box now say they cannot bear to live in the country he governs. The administration's enforcement of border and immigration policy and its muscular approach to foreign affairs, including the Maduro operation, have widened the divide between Hollywood's political class and the voters who put Trump in office.

Democratic strategist calls celebrity exit threats easy to 'roll your eyes at'

Even some on the left seem uneasy with the optics. Democratic strategist Kaivan Shroff, speaking to Fox News Digital, acknowledged the pattern looks unserious.

"Celebrity threats to leave the country are usually pretty easy to roll your eyes at. Most never actually do, Rosie O'Donnell aside. But Garfunkel is 84 years old and has spent more than six decades as one of the most recognizable figures in American music, so this doesn't exactly read like somebody trying to launch a political brand."

Shroff tried to reframe Garfunkel's remarks as something deeper than a celebrity tantrum, telling Fox News Digital that the singer "sounds genuinely disturbed by where he thinks the country is headed, particularly by the idea that the United States can simply decide the old rules no longer apply."

That framing, however generous, does not change the underlying fact: Garfunkel has not identified a single concrete step he has taken toward leaving. No visa applications. No real estate listings. No timeline. The remark sits in the same category as dozens of similar celebrity pledges over the past decade, loud enough to make headlines and vague enough to never require follow-through.

The Trump administration, for its part, has shown little interest in coaxing reluctant celebrities to stay. Its priorities have run toward securing the release of detained Americans abroad, enforcing immigration law, and confronting hostile regimes, the very actions that seem to drive figures like Garfunkel, O'Donnell, and DeGeneres toward the exits.

Wealthy departures expose a familiar disconnect

What unites these celebrity threats is not ideology alone. It is means. Garfunkel, DeGeneres, Cameron, and O'Donnell all possess the wealth to relocate on a whim, to Ireland, to England, to New Zealand. Ordinary Americans who disagree with a president do not have that option. They stay, vote, organize, and live with the consequences of policy decisions made in Washington.

That gap between the exit-ready elite and the stay-and-deal-with-it public has become one of the defining cultural fault lines of the Trump era. Celebrity relocation threats function less as political statements than as displays of privilege. The message, intended or not, is: "I can afford to leave. You cannot."

Garfunkel's own words hint at the tension. He told The Guardian that climate change is "real," that "so many people are starving," and that the country's foreign policy alarms him. These are concerns shared by millions of Americans across the political spectrum. But the response, floating a move abroad from the comfort of a six-decade career in American music, is available only to the few.

The broader fractures within the Democratic coalition have made these departures more visible. When prominent cultural figures walk away from the political fight entirely, it leaves the party's ground-level activists without allies and hands the opposition an easy talking point about out-of-touch elites.

Meanwhile, the administration's agenda continues to move forward. Maduro sits in a Brooklyn detention facility. Border enforcement has expanded. And institutional changes across the federal government proceed regardless of which celebrities choose to watch from overseas.

If Garfunkel does leave, he will join a small but growing club of Americans wealthy enough to treat citizenship like a subscription they can cancel when the programming changes. The rest of the country will do what it always does: stay, work, and govern itself.