Has the celebrity era in American politics come to a close?
This might seem like a peculiar question to ask in the wake of Donald Trump’s second presidential victory. Here he comes, again, the faded reality TV star-turned-world-historical disruptor, a ludicrous showman who may, by the end of the 2020s, end up as consequential for the American political landscape as Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon. This is the apotheosis of celebrity – isn’t it?
And yet a fascinating paradox has taken hold: Trump is a celebrity, but not the candidate of celebrities. Hollywood and pop elites want nothing to do with him. They don’t take him seriously: to them he’s garish and gauche, a wannabe, lacking their tact and even their wealth, since his dodgy finances have probably meant he never truly became a billionaire, despite his loud insistence otherwise.
Over the course of her short campaign, Kamala Harris assembled, arguably, the greatest array of celebrity endorsers ever seen. George Clooney had helped to drive Joe Biden from the race – chiefly by penning an op-ed for the New York Times urging him to drop out – and quickly backed his vice-president. Taylor Swift endorsed her after many months of chatter over what she might do, given her past apolitical bent. Beyoncé enthusiastically campaigned for Harris. Bad Bunny, one of America’s most popular rappers, made her his very first presidential endorsement. And Oprah Winfrey, breaking with her traditional neutrality, not only endorsed Harris, but gave a keynote at the Democratic National Convention (DNC).
All of this came as Charli XCX declared “Kamala is brat” and inaugurated a stunning hype cycle. “Brat summer” came for the Democrats, and to be at the DNC in Chicago that August was to witness a political party in the throes of a kind of ecstasy – joy was the wearying buzzword – that tested your wits. Everyone in Chicago was sure Harris was going to be the 47th president. Rumours briefly swirled that Beyoncé herself was going to perform. A Democratic nominee with Queen Bey at her side? How could she lose?
We know what happened next. Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win a popular vote. He won every swing state. Unlike 2016, everyone knew it wasn’t a fluke. The Russians, Jill Stein, James Comey and Bernie Sanders couldn’t be blamed. The electoral college couldn’t be bemoaned. Trump was the undisputed victor.
And Trump had this triumph in spite of all the celebrity fizz around Harris. Swift’s endorsement, so sweated over in the mainstream media, amounted to nothing: there was no discernible impact on the polls. No Swiftie army overwhelming the Harris campaign headquarters in Pennsylvania and Michigan. No swell of young and middle-aged women to blunt the impact of Maga’s brawling men. No Swift-blessed uprising to counteract the working-class shift to the Republican Party.
Taylor lost. Oprah lost. Beyoncé lost. Bad Bunny did not convince any noticeable share of Spanish-speaking voters to back Harris. Trump instead made large gains, building off his success with Latinos in 2020.
The celebrities who did seem to make a difference had nothing to do with Hollywood or pop royalty. Joe Rogan is famous, but he’s a former reality TV host and Mixed Martial Arts obsessive who won’t be seen cruising through Beverly Hills anytime soon. The podcasters Theo Von and Lex Fridman are hardly global household names. Neither are the various right-wing online influencers who flocked to Trump.
It would be a mistake, though, to simply declare that one kind of celebrity has supplanted another in the endorsement game. Yes, the influencers are influential, but the power of Rogan lies not in his dictates to the masses but in his perceived authenticity: he will speak to a guest on his podcast for hours on end, and his approach is inherently inquisitive. The downside of Rogan is that you will not get much in the way of substantive policy discussion because Rogan is not terribly interested in fact-checking or marinating in data. The upside is that he gives time – real time, not the ten-minute snatches you’ll find on network news – to root around ideas, and any guest of his is forced, in the course of the conversation, to shed the artifice of conventional television and radio. One can’t preen on Rogan in the way one might on CNN.
Rogan himself, unlike a prototypical celebrity endorser, does not talk down to his audience or command them to vote one way or the other. Americans, these days especially, are deeply sceptical of authority figures and experts who decree they know what’s best. Celebrities aren’t exempt. If this anti-institutional bent can get dangerous – here comes Trump, once again, to sow chaos – it also is not entirely irrational. The mainstream institutions and the famed figures who back them have had a rough half decade. Technocrats in America failed to tame the pandemic, for instance, and spread their own misinformation, first insisting masks wouldn’t work, then claiming school shutdowns wouldn’t cause any lasting damage to children’s educations, mental health or social well-being, and finally promising that vaccines could completely stop the spread of the virus, even though they did not.
Throughout 2022, 2023 and well into 2024, party elites, prestige journalists and Democrat-aligned celebrities all insisted that the octogenarian Biden, noticeably fading, was fit to run for a second term. It took the greatest emperor-has-no-clothes moment in modern American history – a TV debate with Trump in which Biden struggled to finish sentences – for reality to finally set in. Millions of Americans began to wonder why they had been lied to.
Harris’s ascension, without a single vote cast for her in a Democratic primary, was also waved away. The celebrities sang for her. Following the DNC, to question her flailing campaign – to wonder why she was not talking more to traditional or alternative media, or demand she put forth a genuine policy platform – was to be labelled an apostate or a Trump booster.
The Democrats, exuding that washed-out celebrity aura, now look like the aloof, tone-deaf party. If Barack Obama’s victories marked the zenith of Hollywood’s political reach, with every star known to mankind basking in the Obamaian glow, Trump’s return to the White House indicates a definitive new era. The next Democratic nominee might not lust so much for pop royalty.
[See also: The dawn of the anti-woke era]
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