The revamped 2025 Golden Globes came and went on Sunday night with its entertaining glamour: stars crammed into the Beverly Hilton ballroom amid the marathon handing out of awards in TV and film categories that saw some of Hollywood’s brightest traipse across the stage and give their acceptance speeches. Everyone (save Jeremy Allen White) was there. But one looming entertainer was notably absent from the lips of attendees: President-elect Donald Trump.
Aside from a brief gag from host Nikki Glaser about Hollywood’s inability to stop his re-election in November, the incoming president and the myriad anti-liberal policies he is threatening to tighten over the next four years largely went unmentioned. Perhaps Glaser summed up the general vibe among the night’s winners and presenters (and their nervous publicists) when she closed out that gag with a trailing-off utterance of, “I’m scared.”
The Golden Globes not only kick off the awards season in early January each year, but the televised show has in recent installments been one of Hollywood’s looser large-scale events, with the wine flowing at each table, bringing down some hair and loosening some tongues. This was the stage, after all, where a sloshy Elizabeth Taylor struggled to announce a winner in 2001 and Jack Nicholson fessed up to taking a Valium during an acceptance speech. That relaxed vibe has also brought politics and liberal Hollywood’s agenda to the Globes’ stage year after year.
When looking back at the ceremony that aired the last time Trump was elected president, a sharp contrast is apparent. The 2017 awards saw Globes royalty Meryl Streep take the stage to accept a lifetime achievement award. The 30-plus time nominee took her moment at the end of former President Barack Obama’s lame-duck period to rally those in the room and watching at home to stand together and fight for the First Amendment, even shouting out the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists and shaming Trump for mocking a reporter with a disability. It was a galvanizing moment that inspired younger Hollywood (“In a weird way, she’s our president,” Rami Malek told the L.A. Times) and the hashtag #Resistance caught the attention of Trump, who afterward called Streep “a Hillary flunky who lost big.”
From there, the Globes became a key showcase of liberal Hollywood politics. Feminist ideals, abortion and LGBTQ rights were brought up on stage during speeches (often for films about these topics) and even more during red-carpet interviews as the Trump years ground on and identity politics began to take hold on the left. Causes grew more specific and idiosyncratic: Patricia Arquette alluding to the airstrike that killed Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani and Joaquin Phoenix’s advocating for veganism come to mind.
Sunday’s show saw nothing approaching this level of political activism. This reluctance to discuss Trump 2.0 is likely the result of a few factors, with the most notable cause swiped at by Glaser. The abbreviated campaign Vice President Kamala Harris ran was notably Hollywood-centric, enlisting A-list stars to endorse her candidacy and had Hollywood producers, actors and power platers fan out across swing states to bolster the Black vote, ensuring top musical acts were there to entertain along the way. But she still lost. And this was pointed out — harped on, you could say — by the Trump camp, Fox News and anyone to the right of Joe Manchin for weeks after the election. This time of licking the wounds of such a loss is not the time to grandstand or espouse personal politics on the E! red carpet.
But is it a time to be afraid, as Glaser whispered to her audience (jokingly — maybe?), and is that what Sunday night’s silence on the incoming administration was about? Revenge has certainly been promised by Trump, who for years has been rejected by Hollywood and spent too much of his time lashing out at its stars on social media and from stages nationwide. This may be the case for some keeping their opinions to themselves. But as Steven Zeitchik points out in a THR column this week, it may be a “recalibration” from those who realize, “If Oprah and Taylor can’t sway the masses, who am I to believe I can?” Not a terrible bit of humble pie to taste, but the fact also remains, despite what some would like to believe, that the election result was no landslide but really only a slight lurch to the right. Not a ton has changed here.
Or maybe the Hollywood awards show set decided to take the data into account. While the sentiment has been in the air for years now, this is the first Globes since a 2023 poll from The Hollywood Reporter/Morning Consult looking at the influence of celebrities found that 47 percent of the 2,000 people polled don’t think star voices are effective at changing minds. And a mere 10 percent indicated that celebrities who are going to make political statements should mostly use events, such as awards shows, as a forum.
The poll also found that 20 percent of respondents said they’d trust a celebrity’s opinion more if they won a major award like an Oscar, Emmy or Grammy. The Globes don’t quite match the gravitas of that trifecta — which may have accounted for stars’ willingness to go off on a political tear in years past. Now, it may be a reason not to bother.
