If you were hoping Jennifer Lawrence might be able to tell you who to vote for and why, you’re in for some disappointment. “I don’t really know if I should,” the actor told the New York Times recently when asked about speaking up about the second Trump administration – and she’s not the only one. “I’ve always believed that I’m not here to tell people what to think,” Sydney Sweeney recently told GQ, after a year in which she was the subject of controversy over a jeans ad and a possible Republican voter registration. This marks a shift from Donald Trump’s first term, when more celebrities seemed not just comfortable speaking out against the administration, but obligated to do so. Now voters will no longer be able to so easily consult with Notes-app-made posts on Instagram to decide who and what they care about before they head to the polls. The era of movie-star-swung elections has come to an end.
Of course, this era didn’t really exist in earnest. Celebrity opinion doesn’t seem to hold much genuine sway over the public, with the possible exception of the segments of each that belong to Taylor Swift. (Call that an extremely vocal plurality, if not necessarily a majority.) If it did, the George Clooney/Jennifer Lawrence/Tom Hanks/Scarlett Johansson party would soundly thump the Dean Cain/Tim Allen/James Woods/Chuck Norris party in every contest. In her recent interview, Lawrence is speaking to precisely that point, albeit without invoking any catty status differences: “As we’ve learned, election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for,” she continues. “So then what am I doing [when speaking out against Trump]? I’m just sharing my opinion on something that’s going to add fuel to a fire that’s ripping the country apart.”
Lawrence still isn’t actually shy about confirming her feelings (“The first Trump administration was so wild and just, ‘how can we let this stand?’” she says earlier in the interview, and she alludes to the dispiriting feeling when some voters actively chose a second term after seeing the results of the first). Sweeney, for her part, is more genuinely evasive. (“I’m just here to kind of open their eyes to different ideas. That’s why I gravitate towards characters and stories that are complicated and are maybe morally questionable, and characters that are – on the page – hard to like, but then you find the humanity underneath them.”) But the effect is similar: putting the work first and doing that shut-up-and-sing thing that has been thrown around, in some form another, for half a century or more but felt particularly amped-up around the George W Bush administration, when applied to the artists formerly known as the Dixie Chicks, among others.
To some extent, Lawrence is correct to advocate for her work as more potentially meaningful than issuing a statement that underlines her celebrity status, noting that her political views are pretty easy to read in terms of what her production company puts out into the world (including a documentary about abortion bans), and what she does as a performer: “I don’t want to start turning people off to films and to art that could change consciousness or change the world because they don’t like my political opinions,” she says elsewhere in the interview. “I want to protect my craft so that you can still get lost in what I’m doing, in what I’m showing.” In other words, it’s the artistic principle of “show, don’t tell” bleeding over into politics.
More personally, who wouldn’t grow exhausted by the expectation that these opinions should be publicly expressed and available for judgment and nitpicking, and prefer instead to speak through art, if that alternate platform was available to them? Trump doesn’t consume art, but he does perform the old-media equivalent of constant name-searching, which means he is likely to name-check any celebrities with high-profile opposition to him – or even those he senses are somehow aligned with his movement, like Sweeney, whose jeans ad he nonsensically praised. Getting dragged into the Trump sphere is a real lose-lose proposition for anyone who wants a genuinely interesting career in the arts. If that sense of self-preservation spares us some cookie-cutter awards show speeches that don’t move the needle outside of the auditorium applause-o-meter, or Clooney relitigating the specifics of Democrats’ mistakes and pitfalls in the 2024 election, all the better.
The other side of that strategy, though, is a form of quivery brand management that doubles as faulty market research, implying a tidy split between Trump supporters and those who oppose the president’s policies. In fact, 77 million voters pulling the metaphorical lever for Trump in 2024 out of approximately 258 million adults in the US equals a less-than-robust 30%, not 50 – a percentage his approval rating has rarely crossed. Currently, that number continues to sit below 40% by most estimates. Maybe that’s splitting hairs; 77 million voters is a hell of a lot of people, and 37% of 258 million is even more than that, even if it’s not a majority. But the gesture toward “lowering the temperature”, as so many including Lawrence allude to, feels less noble and more businesslike capitulation. Personal politics becomes a choice between allowing people to read between the lines (as Lawrence does) or an outright opacity (like Sweeney’s) that is, ironically, very politician-like. It also fits with an executive mindset that treats audiences more like shareholders than human beings.
As little as celebrity advocacy tends to move the needle on broad political decisions, and likely more effectively moved toward particular issues rather than tilting at the windmills erected by specific politicians, it’s also cathartic to see which folks aren’t backing down. It is telling, too, that some of the most outspoken figures are those closer to Trump’s advanced age. Harrison Ford, for example, had no compunction about telling the Guardian that he considers Trump one of history’s biggest criminals. Robert De Niro has gone further as an anti-Trump spokesperson, recently noting that he was “very happy” to see so many mobilizing against Trump at recent No Kings protests, and repeatedly bringing up his concern that Trump will not abide by the legal term limits on his presidency: “We cannot let up because he is not going to leave the White House. Anybody who thinks, ‘Oh, he’ll do this, he’ll do that,’ is just deluding themselves.”
Does anyone need to hear this alarm sounded by De Niro in particular? Probably not, and surely some former fans will dismiss him as an anti-Trump crank. But at 82, the actor is too late in his career to spend much time calculating what is best for business, which also inures him from charges of empty virtue-signaling. He is clearly saying this stuff because he fully believes it. It’s not that De Niro needs Lawrence, Sweeney or whoever else to stand alongside him, but for all the strangeness of a legendary actor reinventing himself as a cable-news staple, it does seem like De Niro better understands his fellow baby boomer New Yorker. He especially seems to get that Trump is a poisonously ironic figure to inspire this kind of celebrity silence.
This president is himself a celebrity first, a corrupt politician second, and an actual political strategist in a distant and possibly accidental third. He may well survey his presidency and secretly conclude that his greatest triumph was asserting that celebrity over others – to get away with literally telling people how to think and how to vote (or maybe in the future, that voting is no longer necessary) while cowing others from expressing their opinions on the matter. If celebrities had no political sway at all, Trump would be doddering and leering his way around a TV studio. Lawrence and Sweeney are right to aspire toward their work saying more than they do – but maybe not for the reasons they think. Celebrity without art is what gets you Donald Trump in the first place. For this administration, it’s not the singing that’s important; it’s the shutting up.
