Donald Trump had Scott Baio and a “Duck Dynasty” star. Hillary Clinton had Jay-Z and Beyonce, Katy Perry and Bruce Springsteen, Clooney and Leo, Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer, among many, many other A-listers who hosted glittering fundraisers, who raised hundreds of millions of dollars for her.
One takeaway: celebrity endorsements in presidential politics don’t matter anymore.
Another, more likely and long-term: They hurt.
Last Thursday, Forbes reported that at least 20 of those named to their Celebrity 100 list of top-paid entertainers publicly supported Hillary Clinton. When Barack Obama ran in 2008, a study published by Northwestern University and the University of Maryland reported that he won more than one million votes directly due to Oprah’s endorsement.
This time around, Oprah endorsed Clinton. Of course, Oprah now lacks the bully pulpit of her talk show and is no longer a near-daily presence in American living rooms. Still, one of our most universally respected celebrities can call Clinton’s run “a seminal moment for women” before flat-out endorsing her, and it fails to move the needle.
Why?
It’s an old saw in conservative circles that Hollywood liberals — and, by extension, the cultural and coastal elite — are out of touch with mainstream America.
This unprecedented election proves, now more than ever, how true that is. While celebrities spoke of social issues, of preserving Obama’s legacy, of the first female president, a huge swath of America voted for one reason: rage at being left behind, economically and culturally.
Less than two months before the election, the Census Bureau reported that U.S. households gained 5.2 percent in income in 2015, the biggest spike since 1967. That data was spun by the New York Times and CNN, among many other mainstream outlets, as fantastic news.
In reality, that increase in middle-income households meant a mere $2,798 extra in annual income, and was 1.6 percent less than in 2007. The top 5 percent of earners saw a stratospheric jump of 21.8 percent in income, while the poorest Americans, a cohort of 46.7 million, are poorer than they were in 1989.
Four days before the Census Bureau’s report was released, Clinton called half of Trump’s supporters “a basket of deplorables” — something J.D. Vance, author of the best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” told The Post was “incredibly reductionist.”
“Like a lot of people on the left, Hillary seems to want to put the Trump phenomenon on racial anxiety,” he said. “It’s a really oversimplified way to address the concerns of millions of people who feel invisible to elites.”
Of course, throughout his campaign, Trump did and said many things that were indefensible. Even those of us who did not vote for him, however, would do well to acknowledge the true animating force of his win.
That those who have money, fame, privilege and status and have no cause to worry — and fail to do so — can only further divide the country and alienate those who, rightly, feel unseen, unheard and looked down upon.
As is now custom, plenty of celebrities vowed to leave the country if Trump won — Bryan Cranston, Samuel L. Jackson, Lena Dunham, Miley Cyrus, Amy Schumer, Chelsea Handler, Keegan-Michael Key and Whoopi Goldberg among them. Jon Stewart and Cher said they’d leave the planet.
Post-election, those celebrities who reacted publicly often did so with a pungent brew of self-pity, condescension and didacticism.
“Don’t Be Afraid, Be Loud: Jennifer Lawrence on What We Do Now,” read the headline on her essay for Vice, published two days after the election. (Lawrence, 26, is the top-paid actress of 2016 with reported income of $46 million.)
“People who voted for him you are weak,” Amy Schumer ranted online. “You are not just misinformed. You didn’t even attempt information . . . [Hillary] was fighting to take care of you kicking and screaming babies.”
“West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin wrote a letter to his daughter and ex-wife, which he published on Vanity Fair’s website.
“Well,” he wrote, “the world changed last night in a way I couldn’t protect us from.” (Nothing smug or sexist about that.)
“The American political system is broken,” tweeted Alec Baldwin, who, if he wants it, has a guaranteed four years’ employment playing Trump on “Saturday Night Live.”
Social media is also part of the problem, giving celebrities a platform to express their opinions on any issue, no matter how banal. Justin Bieber has 65 million followers on Twitter. Kim Kardashian has 32 million; Harry Styles has 24 million. Want to guess the likelihood that income inequality is a recurring topic among this group?
Plenty of stars posted selfies of themselves on line at polling places, or, as Justin Timberlake illegally did, posting a ballot selfie, to no other obvious end than ego gratification. It’s not as though we plebes needed a reminder from famous people to vote in the most consequential election in modern history.
Meanwhile, in the echo chamber of late-night TV —increasingly populated with hosts such as Samantha Bee and John Oliver, who smugly lecture an unseen, applauding audience of fellow liberals — reaction was as vehement.
“It’s pretty clear who ruined America — white people,” Samantha Bee said in her post-election monologue. Fairly trembling with rage, she continued, “the Caucasian nation showed up in droves to vote for Trump, so I don’t want to hear a goddamn word about black voter turnout. How many times do we expect black people to build our country for us? . . . Holy s—t.”
“This sucks,” said Stephen Colbert, adding that he couldn’t accept a President-elect Trump. “I just want to keep saying it until I can say it without throwing up in my mouth a little bit.”
In the run-up to the election, John Oliver took the blame for facetiously urging Trump to run, and then offered Trump one of his Emmys — an Emmy! — if he agreed to accept the election’s result.
“Take the f—king bet,” Oliver exhorted.
It’s an old saw in conservative circles that Hollywood liberals — and, by extension, the cultural and coastal elite — are out of touch with mainstream America.
“The forgotten man and woman,” Trump tweeted after winning, “will never be forgotten again.
Trump was most likely referencing one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats describing the poorest Americans.
“These unhappy times,” Roosevelt said in 1932, “call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”
Nearly 100 years later, these men and women are culturally forgotten too. Not since “Roseanne” went off the air in 1997 has America seen a realistic depiction of what it is to be struggling, white and working class on mainstream TV. In the 1970s, sitcoms such as “All in the Family,” “Good Times,” “Sanford and Son,” and “The Jeffersons” confronted issues of class, race and bigotry in ways ignored today.
In the 1980s and ’90s, there was “Diff’rent Strokes,” “Taxi,” “The Dukes of Hazzard,” “Married . . . With Children.” Today, of course, the balkanization of traditional media has encouraged and enhanced niche storytelling — anyone from upper-class white women behind bars to transgender grandparents can find themselves represented somewhere. In the mainstream, however, little besides Superbowls and presidential elections brings 60 million eyeballs to the screen at once.
National news outlets, too, share the blame. As the election cycle neared its end, as Trump won the nomination, the New York Times, the New Yorker and many other highbrow publications sent reporters out into the heartland, attempting vivisections of just who these idiotic, racist, uneducated Americans supporting Trump were.
The week before the election, New York magazine ran a cover designed by artist Barbara Kruger. It was an angry-looking Trump in black and white close-up, the word “LOSER” stamped across his face.
“As scathing and gorgeous a Trump takedown as there ever was,” said The Huffington Post.
The day before the election, the Times asked, in its Op-Ed pages, “Are There Really Hidden Trump Voters?” The conclusion: Their existence remained unclear, but if they did exist, they would probably remain hidden and give the election to Clinton.
To so much of the media, these Americans are invisible — useful to movie studios, to entertainers and comics on tour, but otherwise relegated to “flyover country,” the ignominious swath of America so dubbed by the elite.
“We’re more socially isolated than ever,” Vance wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy.” “Not having a job is stressful, and not having enough money to live on is even more so.”
Even Bill Maher, hardly a friend to the GOP, conceded as much on his post-election show on Friday. Noting that no amount of money or celebrity endorsements matter, he said, “The Democratic party . . . lost the white working man. That’s what they used to have. And they made the white working man feel like, ‘Your problems aren’t real.’ Democrats, to a lot of Americans, have become a boutique party of fake outrage and social engineering. And they’re not entirely wrong about that.”
If only those super-vocal A-list celebrities who supported Clinton had such a reckoning — or even took their cues from President Obama, who urged the nation to root for Trump’s success. Instead, they continued throwing public temper tantrums. Alec Baldwin said he’d probably never play Trump on “SNL” again. Lena Dunham mocked those who called her bluff about moving to Canada if Trump won. “Stay busy in your new regime,” she posted. Schumer, who earned $17 million last year, posted that anyone expecting her to move to London, as she promised, “is just as disgusting as anyone who voted” for Trump.
Yet the woman who brought the plight of the white working class into American living rooms two decades ago is a Trump supporter. In a tweet Friday night, Roseanne Barr called the anti-Trump movement “classist assholes” and added: “Whoever thought they would hear Republicans calling Democrats ‘the elites?’”
It turns out a C-list reality TV star — who has no A-list friends — understood that best of all.
How Donald Trump trumped the media and the polls: