Why Is Hollywood Suddenly Silent About Trump?

Outside of ‘The Apprentice,’ it's been an eerie quiet.1/2

STEVEN ZEITCHIK January 3, 2025

The digs at Hollywood were blunt and unusual.The Apprentice starswere mad — stunned — that so few of their peers would engage with them.

“People have been afraid to touch this film, to be seen as complicit in the film, to support the film, to publicly endorse the film and certainly to show the film on a streaming platform,” Jeremy Strong, who plays Roy Cohn in the independently financed Donald Trump origin story, told me recently.

“But the role of storytelling is to hold up a mirror. It’s not to make people feel comfortable. It’s not simply to entertain. It is to hold feet to the fire.

"I can’t think of a subject more relevant to what all of us are living through,” he added.“Not to be embraced by the industry has been really hard.”His co-star Sebastian Stan was almost as pointed.

“When it comes to artistry and creativity, we have to be able to protect free speech.It shouldn’t be selective free speech,” Stan, who plays Trump, told THR soon after calling out colleagues for shunning him on Variety’s Actors on Actors.“It should be free speech on all fronts. We can’t get normalized about what we can and can’t talk about.”

Something strange has been happening to The Apprentice, which despite acute timeliness and an 83 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoeshas been willed away by the industry. Most distribution execs wouldn’t touch it; actors won’t talk about it. The film shows how Cohn’s bare-knuckle approach shaped a young Trump. Andwhether entertainers fear validating Trump’s relevance or worry about repercussionsfor seeming critical of his power, they’ve sidestepped the subject. What if they made a movie about Roy Cohn and everyone was afraid of a blacklist?

(Journalists do not seem to feel the same: The Golden Globes nominated both Stan and Strong.)

Such a reception metaphorizes current Hollywood. After deploying every weapon to stop Trump from regaining the White House — letting loose every Beyoncé performance, George Clooney op-ed and Taylor Swift endorsement — the industry has pretty much gone Harold Lloyd-silent since he won.

Yes, Mark Hamill has said that “we get the leaders we deserve,” and indeed, Billie Eilish noted Trump wages “a war on women.”But most contemporary stars haven’t made a sound since Nov. 5.No Jennifer Lawrence “Do not let this defeat you — let this enrage you!” as after the 2016 election, no Robert De Niro commentary (“a real racist”) as he was fond of making last time. Back then, Steve Levitan derided “Trump’s lies,” and Barry Jenkins swore at Trump and his immigration policy from the National Board of Review stage.

Awards season is celebrities’ access lane to politics. Yet at the starting gate of an eight-week sprint, no frenzy awaits at the turn.

Before the 2017 inauguration, Meryl Streep told the Globes that seeing Trump imitate a disabled reporter “broke my heart” before passionately decrying his toxicity. Stranger things have happened, but such speeches do not seem on tap for the upcoming show.

The truest comment about Trumpof late is from the man no one is listening to: Stan’s “we can’t get normalized about what we can and can’t talk about.”

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/hollywood-silence-trump-1236098171/

>>22293992

2/2

Is this a temporary lull, the daze of a resounding loss from which celebrities have yet to awaken?Or a reversion to a permanent state? For decades, entertainers didn’t wade into politics, unconscious cosigners of Michael Jordan’s famous aphorism “Republicans buy sneakers too.”

Trump disrupted that=; suddenly, criticizing a president was acceptable, fashionable. But what seemed like a sea change may in fact have been a blip.

Perhaps the silence isn’t cowardice but recalibration, one may wonder. The 2024 campaign saw every possible celebrity endorsement, Oprah, Clooney, Beyoncé, Taylor — mononymous repositories of our collective trust.Yet a majority of voters didn’t believe. And so an inferential reasoning abides. “If Taylor and Oprah couldn’t sway people, how could I?” “If all the yelling in 2018 didn’t stop him, maybe we try something else?”

The rationale would be easier to embrace if a fresh approach had been advanced. Fine enough to put the knives away. But nothing else has come out of the drawer.

The balance between Silicon Valley and Hollywood long has been tipping — in wealth, in social influence, even in fame.And now the proof: entertainers aware of their diminishing power or, through their silence, contributing to it.

Or perhaps it is just cynical self-interest. If non-MAGA figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos fear for their businesses in Trump: The Return,perhaps celebrities should too. After all, his popular support is that broad.

But is it? The 77.3 million who voted for him cannot drown out the 76.5 million who didn’t. If you were Stan and Strong, you, too, would be perplexed, even furious. “You egged us on,” would be their justifiable attitude. “You wanted us to fight. And when you realized we were losing, you acted as if we didn’t exist.”

If you’re a Democratic fan of liberal celebrities, you’d be right to feel angry.When conservative fan bases stan their stars, the stars stan them back. Joe Rogan. Matt Walsh. Ben Shapiro. Democratic fans might look to their heroes and ask, “Where’s our representation?” “Where’s the mobilization?”

“We got motivated,” they’d say. “And you went and normalized what we can’t talk about.”

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/hollywood-silence-trump-1236098171/

Advice for Hollywood, you ruined film and entertainment by getting into politics, we only came to see movies for entertainment, nothing is entertaining anymore. You just try to insert your political or other opinions on anything that are not related to your craft. Most of you know nothing about politics or the world, no one asked you to give your mostly left leaning bias opinion in the first place. Do us a favor, either go back to acting, and do a good job; or leave acting and go be an activist. These two don't merge well together, and you are hating close to 70% of the population that buys tickets to watch movies, plays etc: basically you are repelling more viewers because you are boring. Hollywood is not respected anymore, basically its you guys slapping each other on the back faining respect of each other.

>>22293991

So almost every user is not taking orders from XiXi Musk's requirement to only discuss what he likes to hear?

Is he intentionally trying to crash and burn Twitter?

Gab and Getter will get a significant uptick of users.

Foreign phone sales plunge 47% in China, spelling trouble for Apple

PUBLISHED FRI, JAN 3 20257:23

KEY POINTS

• In November, foreign mobile phone shipments in China stood at 3.04 million units,down 47.4% year on year, according to CNBC calculations using official Chinese data.

• Apple accounts for the majority of foreign mobile phone shipments in China, with major competitors like Samsung forming just a tiny part of the market.

• The figures highlight the mounting pressure Apple is under in the world’s largest smartphone market as a result of rising competition from domestic brands

The figures highlight the mounting pressure Apple is under in the world’s largest smartphone market as it battles rising competition from domestic brands.

Huawei, for instance — whose handset business was crippled by U.S. sanctions — saw a resurgence in the back end of 2023 and has aggressively launched high-end smartphones in China that have proved popular with local buyers.

Huawei’s growth far outstripped Apple in the third quarter of last year, according to the latest data from research firm IDC.

Apple is hoping its iPhone 16 series, which was released in September, will help the company regain momentum in China, with the Cupertino, California, tech giant promising a host of new artificial intelligence features via its Apple Intelligence software. (16 Sucks, real problems with it, I know)

However, Apple Intelligence is not yet available in China due to complex regulations around AI in the country.

In the meantime, some of Apple’s domestic rivals have been touting their own AI features that are available on devices now.

In a show of how critical China is for the iPhone giant, Apple CEO Tim Cook visited the country multiple times last year in an effort to shore up partnerships for Apple Intelligence with local Chinese firms.

In a bid to spur interest in the iPhone 16, Apple will begin discounts for the device on Saturday as part of a Lunar New Year holiday promotion.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/03/foreign-phone-sales-plunge-47percent-in-china-spelling-trouble-for-apple.html

Foreign ‘Dark Money’ Is Flooding Washington Think Tanks- POLITICO

What was notable about the affair was not any purported outrageousness: Terry allegedly accepted pricey handbags in exchange for publishing relatively conventional op-eds that largely echoed both Korean and U.S. establishment views. She’s denied the charges, and my hunch is that the case against her will be less than a slam dunk in court. Yet the illustrative fact is that so much of what she’s accused of doing is just a sloppier version of the perfectly legal status quo. (South Korea has given at least $4.4 million to top think tanks since 2019, according to the Quincy paper.)

The real question the news ought to raise is: Why is a think tanker’s work worth the investment by a foreign government, legal or otherwise?It’s because the organizations have a cachet in our never-ending political wars.

In fact, the Quincy report is a pretty good example ofthink tank work as political advocacy. This particular think tank, after all, is not an organization dedicated to the abstract question of transparency in policy research. Rather,Quincy describes itself as an “action-oriented” outfit working to “expose the dangerous consequences of an overly militarized American foreign policyand present an alternative approach.”

As an anti-interventionist redoubt, it channels the views of a lot of folks opposed to the internationalist Washington foreign policy “blob” — and presumably more inclined to suspect that the establishment’s views are bought and paid for by self-interested governments and military-industrial buckrakers. No wonder the report focuses on overseas or weapons-manufacturer money, as opposed to donations from Big Pharma or Silicon Valley or any other vested interest that might want to steer American policy.

Or, for that matter, donations from organizations linked to the Koch family or George Soros, both of which donate to Quincy. David Sacks, the tech mogul slated for an AI “czar” position in the Trump administration, has also contributed to the organization’s publication.

For his part, Freeman said he’d love to eventually see research on think tank donations from other sectors. The report currently ranks organizations based on their transparency, and will coincide with thelaunch of a funding tracker designed to enable readers to search foreign and military donations to think tanks the same way they can search for donations to elected officials. Whatever the authors’ foreign-policy motivations were, it’s a smart and useful idea.

As for his own organization, Freeman said, the relevant thing is that we know who the donors are, which depending on your view of the benefactors may help put the group’s work in context, positive or otherwise: “I think the thread across all of our recommendations is this transparency.Think tanks should put all their cards on the table, then let the recipients of their information be able to judge for themselves.”

https://archive.is/WzCUa

>>22294140

Duh the fake president is still in charge until the 20th, so thats the way it goes. Do you think he'll be kind to Trump

>>22294233

Yeah to me too, BTW Cheyenne Mtn is still locked down after Trump locked it down on March 15th, 2020. Remember he said many times early on in Covid, we are at war. It sure feels like its accelerating too.

MY MAN!!!😂😂😂

He doesn't look very happy

0:10

https://rumble.com/embed/v63pt7v/?pub=4

BACK TO RUNNING HELL!!!🔥🤣🤣🤣

Oh shit, this scared the hell out of me.

0:29

https://rumble.com/embed/v63p9ks/?pub=4

>>22294370

Yes it was, whatever is going on we don't know what it is. Unless its another psyop from the gov, they are dropping everything possible to scare the shit out of Americans. Even the chinese flu, but no ones buying that again