Who Will Lead Hollywood’s Political Revival After Trump?

In the weeks leading up to the Oscars, Jeffrey Katzenberg was spotted gingerly navigating his way around town on crutches and in a foot brace — the result, The Hollywood Reporter has learned, of a recent fall. It’s not polite to note such an impairment, but in the case of Katzenberg, it’s too fitting a metaphor to let slip by.

After decades toggling between top studio and production jobs, the peripatetic 72-year-old billionaire has been on a cold streak of late. In the wake of the catastrophe that was Quibi, the shortform video platform he founded with former eBay CEO Meg Whitman that burned through $1.75 billion in startup funding before shuttering in less than two years, Katzenberg took a business sabbatical to focus on politics and cement his reputation as a go-to political power broker in the mold of Lew Wasserman. In 2023, he co-chaired Joe Biden’s re-election campaign. That project, of course, crashed even harder than Quibi did.

As part of Biden’s inner circle, Katzenberg has been blamed for (at best) failing to recognize the president’s decline or (at worst) covering up for it. There’s a reason Katzenberg ran point for as long as he did. Few could match his energy and relentless drive, but when Kamala Harris assumed the nomination, Katzenberg played a minimal role in her fundraising efforts, and he has yet to publicly address what he really knew of Biden’s health. (He declined to comment for this story.)

For Katzenberg’s critics, of which there are many, it’s a well-deserved comeuppance for a mogul whom many L.A.-based Democrats partially blame for the mess they find themselves in. “Getting Biden re-elected was going to be Jeffrey’s great redemption,” says an L.A.-based political consultant with ties to the entertainment industry. “Instead, it all fell to pieces. We don’t have the White House. We don’t have the Senate, and we don’t have the House. And donors feel like they got conned.”

Two and a half months into Donald Trump‘s second term, the mood inside the industry’s political class veers between bewilderment and submission. Gone is the urgency and energy that marked the days and weeks following Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, which saw worldwide protests including the Women’s March, where hundreds of thousands of protesters stormed downtown L.A. MAGA is in ascent. The Democrats — and by extension Hollywood liberals — are in a political wilderness, and all signs suggest that Katzenberg’s tenure as Hollywood’s chief political operator is nearing its end. A vacuum has opened, prompting two existential questions within an industry that’s grasping for a way forward:

Can anyone replace Katzenberg as the political face of the town? And perhaps more importantly: Given the political climate, should anyone replace him?

The Trump administration’s retributive style complicates those questions. Brendan Carr, Trump’s FCC chair, appears intent on keeping media corporations in ideological line, which means that heavy-hitter liberals like Disney’s Bob Iger and Dana Walden (a close Harris friend), Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, Marvel’s Kevin Feige and Comcast’s Donna Langley are likely neutered. As fiduciaries, they’ve got shareholders’ interests to prioritize.

There was a moment when such industry stalwarts as producer J.J. Abrams or management mogul and L.A. Olympics czar Casey Wasserman, both prolific Democratic bundlers, seemed poised to assume the perch vacated by Katzenberg, but neither has yet met the challenge. The former’s fundraising has waned of late, and any electoral efforts the latter might now pursue would complicate his work on the 2028 Summer Games. Interviews with a variety of political consultants and donor advisers suggest that few others are likely to step into the breach. Some argue that the ascendance of Silicon Valley and the trend of tech companies taking over Hollywood should broaden the search. The proposed merger between Skydance and Paramount has elevated the profile of Oracle fortune heir David Ellison, 42, who gave almost $1 million to Biden’s re-election campaign. However, his father and financial backer, Larry Ellison, is a high-profile Trump supporter. Another name that has emerged is billionaire Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, 34, who recently launched the Department of Angels to aid in the rebuilding of the communities impacted by the Eaton and Palisades wildfires. But a consultant who has worked with Spiegel says he prefers being seen as a philanthropist and has little interest in stepping into the political sphere.

All of which leads to the conclusion offered by L.A.-based political consultant Mike Murphy: “The era of the self-appointed mega political [figure] is over. That’s because no one — especially after Katzenberg — trusts these self-appointed kings anymore.”

Among industry donors, there’s a general sense that they’re not quite ready to open their pocketbooks to Democrats rolling through town with hat in hand. “Tell me your message and explain what we’re going to do before you ask us for a blind check,” says a top industry donor who’s been active for decades. This donor was referring to a fundraiser held in March for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ Victory Fund, which hands out money to the DCCC and others. Tickets to the fundraiser, at which Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA) were also present, went for $10,000 to $100,000. “I think when it comes time for the midterms and there are active campaigns going, the checks will start flowing again. But that election is way off, and right now asking for a donation to the party seems like — well, when you get your act together, we can talk about it.”

Hollywood’s current political reckoning isn’t just about distrust and fear of Trump. The entertainment industry is fractured and is no longer the cultural or financial force it was even a decade ago. Furthermore, arguably the industry’s biggest assets — celebrities — have been cast as political liabilities in the wake of Trump’s victory. Everyone from George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey to Taylor Swift and Beyoncé supported Harris, yet despite those endorsements, fewer working-class voters came out for Harris than did for Biden in 2020. “The old Hollywood model, in terms of the ways that we used to support the [Democratic] party, is dead. And it should be, because it doesn’t work,” says screenwriter Billy Ray, who for the past several national election cycles has worked with Democrats on their messaging.

Ray notes that when Democrats suffered defeats in the past, there usually was an acknowledgment and commitment to adjust and change; Obama did it in 2010 after the midterms, as did Hillary Clinton in 1994. But at least so far, the absence of introspection shown by the Democrats in the face of their November defeat has shocked him. “We just dropped $6.7 billion on an election cycle. And yet if you stopped almost any American on the street and asked them, ‘What does the Democratic party stand for?’ They probably can’t tell you. That’s a problem.”

As one producer with political contacts observes, “You go to these dinners since the election and people are paralyzed. They’re just repeating what they’re hearing from Rachel Maddow. They don’t know what to do. The richest ones are hanging back, figuring they’ll make money right now [on Trump’s tax policies] and sort it out later.” This source adds, “There’s a chill now — an arctic chill. It doesn’t matter what a well-intentioned Jeffrey Katzenberg or Rob Reiner do or don’t do when someone at the Jeff Bezos level is immediately capitulating, dumping $40 million on that Melania documentary.”

Murphy concurs. “I don’t think Hollywood influence is gone, but it’s much more fragmented now.”

Comedian Adam Conover, a prominent leftist voice in the industry who serves on the board of the WGA West, contends that Hollywood, after a rabble-rousing rebellion during Trump’s first term, is likely to be far more accommodating in his second — especially after an election that ratified the notion of its diminished power as a political force. “Hollywood goes where the wind blows,” he says. “The election was a rightward turn. We’re living in a different world. The media can and will get conservative again. Everybody watched 24 in George W. Bush’s America, including liberals.”

There’s another element at play in the political power vacuum that now exists in Hollywood: its gerontocracy crisis. Katzenberg built his clout, contacts and pocketbook in the 1980s as a 30-something studio chief at Paramount and Disney. At the time, his age was in line with the rest of the presidents of production of the majors. These days, those influential posts are mostly still held by boomers. Next-gen execs, reflecting updated worldviews, haven’t been elevated to positions that would allow them to become kingmakers.

In the lead-up to the 2018 midterms, a younger, more diverse class of political players from the worlds of TV and film started to emerge. There was an unprecedented level of political activism, much of it at the grass-roots level. Christy Callahan, a former motion picture creative executive who now serves as a senior adviser to the national gun violence prevention group Brady, hosted dozens of fundraisers, the majority of which were low-dollar events that brought in anywhere from $50,000 to the low six figures. Her concern, after seeing some of the richest men in the world attend Trump’s inauguration, including Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, is that the “small-dollar events won’t matter anymore.”

After the election, Ray spent two days in political mourning. But his resolve is back. When colleagues and peers from the entertainment industry ask him what they should be doing nowadays, Ray tells them: “I’m going to be bringing you a string of candidates who can win in the heartland, and they may not agree with you fully on guns and may not agree fully on pronouns, but you’ve got to support them anyway because they are the future of the party, and it’s either that or we don’t have a future.

“People who tell stories for a living or people who take them to market know Nov. 5 was a massive swing and a miss,” he continues. “It’s incumbent on us to tell the people in the party just how far off the target they’ve been. If anybody in the world understands what it’s like to be rejected by the marketplace, it’s people in Hollywood.”

With the industry feeling politically rudderless, perhaps it’s time for a casting call: “Seeking well-connected, energetic power broker with a keen sense of narrative.”