With the 2024 US election now done and dusted, with Donald Trump having won the popular vote and Republicans holding majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives, the traditionally liberal stars of Hollywood are understandably shocked, deflated and anxious about what a second Trump term may mean for their industry.
In 2016 when Trump first won, Hollywood seemed to relish the opportunity to use its cultural influence to fight against the conservative establishment. Alec Baldwin took on the role of the president for Saturday Night Live and won an Emmy for his parody and Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, an adaptation of the dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood, won awards for its presciently terrifying depiction of a world overtaken by the Christian far-right. The rage that many had felt at Trump’s win by means of the electoral college and not the popular vote, motivated creatives to get up and do something to ensure that it wouldn’t happen again. Joe Biden’s 2020 win appeared to have rewarded their efforts and after he dropped out of the race earlier this year, Hollywood threw its support firmly behind his replacement, Kamala Harris, helping to raise record amounts for her campaign.
Now, as Trump returns with an overwhelming popular mandate, Hollywood doesn’t seem to know what to do about it. To use its cultural power to attack Trump this time around would be to attack the majority of Americans who have elected him and spit in the face of democracy.
It would also be bad for Hollywood’s foundational pillar — business. After the hits that the industry has taken in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, recent strikes and the fear around the increased use of artificial intelligence (AI), Hollywood can’t afford to alienate audiences for political point-scoring. Don’t be surprised then if there’s a sudden pivot towards bland escapism in the era of Trump 2.0 as Hollywood buries its head in the sand in an effort to make a profit as inoffensively and with as little controversy as possible.
The potential for backlash from the Trump White House against perceived enemies in the media is particularly terrifying for America’s public broadcasting institutions. In his first term Trump repeatedly attempted to slash federal support for the arts, proposing a cut in funding for the Public Broadcasting Corporation — which funds National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) — from an annual $445m to just $30m and to entirely scrap the National Endowment for the Arts, on which many artists in the US depend for project funding. Those proposals were unsuccessful but this time, with full Republican control of all government branches, it may be more difficult to stop Trump from enacting his revenge against US cultural institutions that he feels have descended into “wokeism”.
Trump has also made noises about bringing the country’s Federal Communications Commission under his personal control, allowing him to potentially revoke the broadcast licences of TV networks that he believes are overly critical of him.
One of the possible reactions to these threats might be that the American entertainment industry as a whole makes a clear move away from overtly political content over the next four years, towards more escapist, in a 180º turn away from its previous 2016 attempts to influence politics through critically engaging content.
While many Hollywood stars and players have gone online since last week to rally liberal Americans not to be despondent and fight back against the threats they feel a second Trump presidency will pose to non-white, female, immigrant and poor citizens, their outrage is not necessarily a sentiment shared by the men who run the powerful entertainment conglomerates that keep the cogs of the Hollywood machine turning.
Controversial Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who has been a vocal critic of the overregulation of the industry under the Biden presidency, was one of the first major Hollywood players to not so subtly welcome the potential changes offered by a second Trump term. Zaslav told industry analysts and investors on November 7 that the new administration could “offer a pace of change and an opportunity for consolidation that may be quite different” and “provide a real positive and accelerated impact on this industry that’s needed”. His sentiments were echoed by other CEOs such as Nexstar’s Perry Sook and Sinclair’s Chris Ripley who seem excited by the opportunities for major conglomerate deal-making that Trump’s anti-Biden deregulatory economic policies will potentially free up.
The sky could be the limit for corporations in the industry in the new Trump era as they throw off the shackles of the Biden administration’s tougher antitrust interventions. The only thing that might threaten their eager plans for world entertainment domination might be if creatives made content that was deemed by Trump to be too personally offensive or critical and led to him scuttling deals that would benefit the companies responsible for such content. After all, as Chapman University’s Stephen Galloway recently told the LA Times: “Back in the day, studios were little companies making movies... Now they’re cogs in enormous, multinational operations where one domino suddenly sends 50 others falling.”
In the wake of the election, the Motion Picture Association trade group, which lobbies on behalf of studios, swiftly released a statement in which it congratulated Trump and the incoming Republican Congress on their victories. In the statement the group said it looked forward to “working with them on a wide range of important issues for the film, TV and streaming industry, which supports more than 2.7-million American jobs, boosts more than 240,000 businesses in cities and small towns across the country, and delivers more than $242bn in wages to our workforce each year”.
So it appears that this time the upper echelons of Hollywood are making it clear that they know on which side their bread is buttered.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.