What Democrats could learn about political messaging from a Mark Wahlberg action film by one of Donald Trump's newly-appointed "ambassadors to Hollywood."
In her Golden Globes acceptance speech in 2017, not long after Donald Trump was elected for the first time, Meryl Streep said, "Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if we kick 'em all out, you'll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts."
Of course, that same guy has since been elected for a second time. The country seems mostly resigned to it. The Democrats are increasingly at sea. And the intense stigma that once came with the perception of Trump collaboration now seems to be softening. All of which has made the present feel like a mask-off moment for Hollywood conservatives. Actors and creators (but mainly actors) whose rightward leanings were once discussed only in whisper or euphemism (is Chris Pratt a crypto-conservative?) have suddenly realized that cozying up to Trump might be as shrewd a career move as keeping one's views out of the newspapers to avoid alienating liberal colleagues once was. Will more of Hollywood's limousine liberals soon go the way of the supposedly-progressive Big Tech CEOs -- that is, far to the right?)
Trump recently named Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone as his "Special Ambassadors to Hollywood." As with most ceremonial Trump titles, it's unclear what this actually means in practice or whether it pays any money. Yet the three do seem to roughly represent the spectrum of Hollywood conservatism. First, there's Voight, long an outspoken culture warrior who works mostly on the openly lib-triggering side of Hollywood these days (see: his role in Reagan) and has been publicly conservative since at least this 2008 op-ed for the Washington Times in which he called Obama a dangerous socialist. Voight loudly endorsed Trump in 2016 and seems to have been the person Trump was confusing with Anthony Hopkins during Trump's "late great Hannibal Lecter" phase over the summer, when he was claiming endorsement from the fictional cannibal played by Hopkins. (Voight was a loud Trump supporter who kind of looks like Hopkins, who played Lecter in Silence of the Lambs; hence Trump saying "Hannibal Lecter, how great an actor was he? You know why I like him? Because he said on television, 'I love Donald Trump.' So I love him.")
At the other end of the spectrum, there's Sylvester Stallone. Although Stallone's brother Frank Stallone has long been one of the loudest Boomer MAGA guys online, Sly himself has until now been avowedly neutral -- which may be why he's stayed so busy as an actor. Certainly one could infer things from Sly's movies, like Rambo: Last Blood, a hyper-violent revenge fantasy about human trafficking and Mexican cartels. (The best test of a movie or show's conservative leanings remains how often it includes the words "cartel," "trafficking," or "sicario"). But all the way up until 2019, Stallone was chiding people for assuming (presumably wrongly) that he was "hardcore right." And as of 2023 he was still doing ideologically baffling things like donating to Kyrsten Sinema. More recently, Stallone has referred to Trump as a "second George Washington" and called him "almost a mythical figure." Sly's appointment to Trump's triumvirate of Hollywood seers seems to confirm his authoritarian leanings, but it is some consolation knowing how much of a blow it must've been to Frank's ego.
Which brings us to Mel Gibson, who in some ways has been as politically hard to pin down as Stallone, but has long existed in a sort of public-opinion limbo. Passion of the Christ was bashed by some as anti-Semitic (even by the ADL, who were more recently seen making excuses for Elon Musk's Hitler salutes), but went on to be one of the most profitable movies of all time. And then there were multiple rounds of leaked audiotapes, in which Gibson could be heard saying "the Jews cause all the wars" (2006) and "if you get raped by a pack of [N-words], it will be your fault" (2010).