‘Tiger King’ Joe Exotic runs for president from prison, Libertarian Party says he shouldn’t be taken seriously

Netflix star Joe “Exotic” Maldonado, also known as “The Tiger King,” announced his candidacy to run for president earlier this year, but the Libertarian Party is not taking his campaign seriously.

Maldonado, who was incarcerated in 2018 on murder-for-hire charges, filed Federal Election Commission (FEC) documents in February to run as a Libertarian presidential candidate in 2024 under the slogan “Make America Exotic.”

“Put aside that I am gay, that I am in prison for now, that I used drugs in the past, that I had more than one boyfriend at once and that Carole [Baskin] hates my guts. This all has not a thing to do with me being able to be your voice,” he wrote in a statement on his newly launched campaign website. “The best thing you have going for supporting me is that I am used to fighting my whole life just to get by. I am broke, they have taken everything I ever worked for away, and it’s time we take this country back.”

Despite Maldonado’s assurance that his presidential campaign is no joke, Angela McArdle, chair of the Libertarian Party, said Maldonado is “just tigers and glitter.”

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“We stand for personal and economic freedom, we are not a landing pad for former reality stars and D-list celebrities,” McArdle told TMZ in an interview.

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During a recent interview with The Florida Standard, Maldonado said that former President Donald Trump “played” him in the headlines, and claimed it likely cost Trump the White House. “If he would’ve pardoned me, he wouldn’t have had to call Georgia and ask for 11,000 votes, because he would’ve got ’em,” he said.

Maldonado, who has 20 years left to serve in his prison sentence, also revealed that “as bad of a job as [President] Biden’s doing right now and as bad of a job as Trump did, I would vote for either one of them two before I vote for Ron DeSantis.”

The former television personality said the first thing he would do if he won in 2024 is pardon himself and “every person that’s in federal prison on conspiracy charges that never got caught with drugs.”

Maldonado is selling “Joe Exotic 2024” campaign t-shirts, wristbands and bumper stickers on his website to “help him break the chains of government corruption and greed that hold our citizens captive and give the rights back to the people, where they belong.”

Whether a candidate can succeed in an election if they’ve been arrested was raised over the weekend after Trump announced he expected to be indicted and even arrested on hush money allegations. 

The U.S. Constitution only states three requirements for running for president, none of which specifically prevent a candidate from running for president while in prison.