After Donald Trump’s upset election victory in 2016, Hollywood got angry. Then it got organised. “It was a total shock, and then it released a huge burst of energy,” a longtime Hollywood executive says of Trump’s first election win. “People talked about the ‘resistance’, how we’re going to fight and stand up for what we believe in.”
That was then. Now, in the wake of Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris — who lives in Los Angeles’ posh Brentwood neighbourhood with her entertainment lawyer husband, Doug Emhoff — the mood is stunned, deflated. “We formed protest groups in 2016,” the executive continued. “This time there’s none of that.”
Even in liberal LA, Trump’s share of the vote rose 5 per cent from 2020. He beat Harris in Beverly Hills, proof that politics in the city are “not monolithic,” says a veteran agent. “There are pockets of folks who are quietly happier about the result than they would want anyone to know.”