Donald Trump has permitted himself the delicious pleasure of trolling Hollywood’s celebrity-woke community who once dreamed of preventing his second term with their collective prestige. He has found a new wellspring of liberal tears in which to bathe. But whatever our feelings about his proposed “Hollywood ambassadors”, Mel Gibson, Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone – ambassadors to Hollywood from Maga? to Maga from Hollywood? – it’s possible to wonder if the ambassadors themselves have a right to be a bit miffed.
Hollywood ambassador? Gibson has directed a number of feature films, (Stallone and Voight also have directing credits); these are vast organisational challenges, requiring energy, vision, skill and political finesse. And that zero-experience lunkhead Pete Hegseth gets to be defence secretary? Despite only knowing how to do sycophantic interviews with the once-and-future C-in-C on Fox News? What an insult to Gibson, Voight and Stallone who surely deserve cabinet posts. Arnold Schwarzenegger is perhaps constitutionally out of the running to be a Hollywood ambassador despite his own political experience, maybe because of his Austrian birth or his bold questioning of rightwing views.
Trump is showing his own distinctive genius for anti-tact in making these mischievous appointments, and our three amigos will have savoured Trump’s avowed claim to revive Hollywood “which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries”. In what sense post-Covid Hollywood has lost business overseas is up for debate – most of the streaming TV companies to which they have lost business are American-owned. And stars of a certain vintage will of course know that these “Foreign Countries” are a vital export market for old-school US action mayhem.
Well, they are now the ambassadors, and the Jamesian subtlety and resonance of that title is something else they will savour before their responsibilities officially begin with Monday’s inauguration, which they will presumably attending with cigars lit. They have of course proved their loyalty by toughly sticking to unfashionable pro-Maga views during the Biden-Harris years. Gibson’s California home burned to the ground while he was actually doing an interview on the Joe Rogan podcast, a grim event we wouldn’t wish on anybody. But it doesn’t mean we have to have to be diplomatic about Gibson’s opinion about the wildfires, expressed during an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, that the fires were deliberately started by unknown forces to move people off valuable property: “What could it be? You know, what do they want? The state empty?”
And with the Israel-Hamas ceasefire at a delicate stage, is this a good time to be promoting and rewarding Gibson in such a specifically political way? Gibson, who has had to apologise for making antisemitic slurs after a DUI arrest in 2006 and then icily deny making similarly vile antisemitic remarks at a Hollywood party around the same time?
Well, Voight has said his daughter Angelina Jolie’s support for Gazan refugees is the result of “antisemitic propaganda”. So perhaps promoting both Voight and Gibson is Trump’s way of addressing the various factions of his base.
Beneath all this, you can hear Washington’s one great Hollywood ambassador turning in his grave: Ronald Reagan, the stolid B-lister who converted his journeyman acting skills into the presentational flair necessary for the White House back in the 1980s. For all his faults, Reagan believed in serious politics – and diplomacy.