POLITICIANS FAIR GAME
Stars take aim at candidates
It’s a bit of footage so intense that it’s almost hard to watch. A respected artist stares into a camera and out comes a torrent of anger and frustration at his enemy.
He calls the other man “a pig,” “an idiot” and “a mutt, who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” He ends the minutelong diatribe with a promise of violence: “I’d like to punch him in the face.”
It’s shocking stuff, all the more for the fact that the man speaking is Robert De Niro and his target is Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s U.S. presidential candidate.
Politics is a brutal game in any year, but the 2016 U.S. election has provoked a visceral, intense response from many in the arts community, prompting songs, videos and uncommon ferocity against Trump, arguably once one of their own.
The anger against the former Apprentice host ranges from America Ferrera’s blistering open letter calling Trump “living in an outdated fantasy of a bigoted America,” to Carly Simon repurposing her song You’re So Vain into an anti-Trump anthem, to singer-rapper Will.i.am’s damning video GRAB’m by the ...
The prospect of a potential President Trump prompted filmmaker Michael Moore to create the iTunes film Michael Moore in TrumpLand and he suspects there may be some guilt on the part of Hollywood for helping shape his rise.
“Perhaps part of it is he’s one of ours and he got loose. So we take it as a personal responsibility to bring him back to the zoo,” Moore said. “He is a creation of us — of our industry — otherwise he just would have been known as a big, New York blowhard to New Yorkers.”
This year, celebrities have been galvanized by Trump’s stands on immigration, policing and the treatment of women, among many other issues. In addition to supporting Clinton, many stars are also using social media to bash Trump.
Some in the arts community have been more gentle, like the cast of Will & Grace, which reunited for a 10-minute video to mock Trump, or actor James Franco spoofing Dos Equis ads with a video endorsement of Clinton as “The Most Interesting Woman in the World.” The cast of Empire, along with creator Lee Daniels, firmly endorsed Clinton.
But others have hardly disguised their blazing anger and disgust at the GOP leader. Comedian Amy Schumer called him an “orange, sexual-assaulting, fakecollege-starting monster,” and her diatribe against Trump at one of her shows caused some to walk out. And many TV talk show hosts — specifically Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee and Seth Myers — roast Trump nightly, in brutal terms.
Trump has a few celebrities fighting in his corner, including Jon Voight and Charles in Charge actor Scott Baio, who spoke at the Republican National Convention. But opponents have most of the passion. Bands like Death Cab For Cutie, Jim James, Franz Ferdinand and R.E.M. have contributed songs for a “Trump-Free America” campaign.
Kathryn Cramer Brownell, an assistant professor of history at Purdue University and author of Showbiz Politics: Hollywood in American Political Life, said celebrity activism is a lot more visible this year as stars decide they need to act.
“There have been times historically that the Hollywood community has mobilized,” she said, “when they feel that there are very pressing issues at hand and that they’re willing to go beyond and enter into the political arena in ways in which perhaps some of them had felt uncomfortable before because it could alienate certain fans.”