Trump may screen ‘The Post’ at the White House
THIS could make for some interesting viewing: The White House may be screening the movie “The Post,” whose stars are huge critics of President Trump and whose message is seen as a rebuke to the president’s attacks on the media.
The Hollywood Reporter reports that Team Trump sought out copies of the drama, which centres on The Washington Post’s 1971 decision to publish the Pentagon Papers over the objection of the Nixon administration, to show at movie theatres at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and at Camp David this weekend.
That could make for an unlikely audience of White House staffers, GOP lawmakers being hosted at the presidential retreat and, who knows, maybe the president himself.
It’s common practice for the White House to obtain current releases to show for the first family, staff and guests — but this one’s a little different. Director Steven Spielberg has linked his decision to make the film to Trump’s hostility toward the media, which he likened to that of the Nixon era. “This was the only year to make this film,” he told the Hollywood Reporter in an interview last year.
And its stars, Tom Hanks as Post executive editor Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as publisher Katharine Graham, are no fans of Trump. Streep famously delivered an impassioned anti-Trump speech at the 2016 Golden Globes, in which she castigated him for mocking a disabled reporter. “This instinct to humiliate, when it’s modelled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing,” the actress said.
But it seems one of the movie’s producers, Amy Pascal, was going out of her way to downplay any whiff of partisanship around the flick, telling the Hollywood Reporter that “a number of top Republicans,” including top Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, came to a private screening in Washington held by the Graham family.
“They completely loved the movie, because the movie is about America and the movie is about the truth,” she said. “This movie is for everyone.”
More proof that even the most devoted Trump-er could give the film a thumbs-up? “Kellyanne loved it, too,” Pascal told the publication. “And danced all night with (“Post” co-writer) Josh Singer.” — WP-Bloomberg