You’re really spoiling us: Trump tricks Gibson, Stallone and Voight into mere ambassadors | Movies

DDonald Trump has indulged in the delicious pleasure of trolling the Hollywood celebrity community who once dreamed of preventing his second term with their collective prestige. He found a new source of liberal tears in which to bathe. But whatever our feelings about the proposed “Hollywood ambassadors,” Mel Gibson, Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone – Maga ambassadors to Hollywood? to Maga from Hollywood? – one might wonder whether the ambassadors themselves have the right to be a little offended.

Hollywood ambassador? Gibson has directed a number of feature films (Stallone and Voight also have directing credits); they are vast organizational challenges that require energy, vision, skill and political finesse. And this inexperienced idiot, Pete Hegseth, will become Secretary of Defense? Even if he doesn’t know what to do with sycophantic interviews with the former and future C-in-C on Fox News? What an insult to Gibson, Voight and Stallone who surely deserve ministerial positions. Arnold Schwarzenegger may be constitutionally out of the running to become a Hollywood ambassador despite his own political experience, perhaps because of his Austrian birth or his bold challenge to right-wing views.

Trump is displaying his own anti-tact genius in making these mischievous appointments, and our three friends will have relished Trump’s avowed claim to revive Hollywood “which has lost a lot of business in the last four years to foreign countries “. The extent to which Hollywood has lost overseas business after the Covid crisis is up for debate: Most of the streaming TV companies to which it has lost business are owned by Americans. And stars of a certain vintage will of course know that these “foreign countries” provide a vital export market for the chaos of old-fashioned American action.

Well, they’re the ambassadors now, and the subtlety and Jamesian resonance of that title is something else they’ll savor before their responsibilities officially begin with Monday’s inauguration, which they’ll likely attend with cigars lit. They have, of course, proven their loyalty by resolutely sticking to old-fashioned pro-Maga views during the Biden-Harris years. Gibson’s California home burned to the ground while he was doing an interview on the Joe Rogan podcast, a grim event we wouldn’t wish on anyone. But that doesn’t mean we have to be diplomatic about Gibson’s opinion on the wildfires, expressed during an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, that the fires were deliberately set by unknown forces to keep people away from valuable possessions: “What could it be?” be? You know, what do they want? The Empty State?

And with the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas at a delicate stage, is this the right time to promote and reward Gibson in such a specifically political way? Gibson, who had to apologize for uttering anti-Semitic slurs after a drunk-driving arrest in 2006, then coldly deny having made equally vile anti-Semitic remarks at a Hollywood party around the same time?

Well, Voight said his daughter Angelina Jolie’s support for Gaza refugees was the result of “anti-Semitic propaganda.” So maybe promoting Voight and Gibson is Trump’s way of speaking to the different factions of his base.

Behind it all, you can hear Washington’s great ambassador to Hollywood turning in his grave: Ronald Reagan, the deadpan B-lister who parlayed his acting chops into the presenting talent needed in the White House in the 1990s. 1980. For all his faults, Reagan believed in serious politics – and diplomacy.