To pigeonhole her as a Hollywood liberal misses some of the nuance of her politics. She voted for Ross Perot in 1992, which she announced to Larry King on CNN — once again dialing in but this time not shrouded in anonymity. “I was really nervous, I was really frightened, but my conscience is clear,” she told Mr. Perot, who was a guest of Mr. King’s that night.

She told me she was so strongly moved to oppose Mr. Trump not solely because of his politics but because she felt he was dangerously misguided and intemperate. Ronald Reagan, she said, was a Republican she disagreed with politically but did not fear personally.

“He did nothing for AIDS, and he just stood back when people were dying,” she said. “But there were things that you could say, ‘He makes a good president’ — for some people. But I wasn’t frightened really that he could bring the country to his knees because he knew nothing about how to govern.”

She says she is no fan of the government and has little confidence it can solve the employment problems that come with a rapidly changing economy, which she blames on cold, impersonal decisions made by dollar-driven chief executives.

“It’s criminal what’s happened to these people who had great jobs in Detroit, who worked in steel in Pittsburgh,” she said. “We’ve lost respect for everything that doesn’t make money.” Or for jobs that don’t require four-year college degrees, she added: “The janitor at my school, we called him ‘Mr.’”

Politics have been at the periphery of Cher’s life since the 1960s. Her first husband would become one of the country’s most famous Republicans: Mr. Bono, who was the mayor of Palm Springs and a congressman for two terms until he died in a skiing accident in 1998.