Trump Trolls Hollywood: Oscars ‘Failed’ When ‘They Came After Us’

Proving himself once again to be a master troll artist, President Trump ripped into Hollywood while speaking Thursday night before an uproarious crowd at his Dallas rally, scolding the industry for attacking conservatives and Trump supporters.

First, the president attacked television networks for their low ratings as they allegedly push fake news onto the American people, which then segued into blasting the Oscars for generating poor ratings while attacking his political supporters.

“Don’t worry. I won’t say anything bad about your network,” Trump told reporters, as reported by Fox News. “Because a lot of the times, I get ready to do a number on these phony networks and you know, you see those red lights go off off off off. They don’t want their viewers to see it. But that’s OK, I’m not going to say it tonight. I’m going to say, ‘You’re legitimate media.’ I don’t actually mean that.”

“But look at all those cameras,” Trump continued. “That’s like the Academy Awards used to be before it failed. You know why it failed? You know why it failed? Because they came after us. That’s why it failed. It failed because they had stupid people saying horrible things about us. Stupid, stupid people. They are stupid people, and their ratings have dropped like a rock, and I love seeing it, I’m telling you. Love it. But no matter how hard they try, they will fail because the people of Texas and the people of America will never surrender our freedom to those people right there.”

While the Oscars saw a small uptick in viewership this past year, the noted award ceremony has arguably been declining both in quality and in popularity since the 2016 election. In 2018, the year that host Jimmy Kimmel essentially delivered a purely political rant in his opening monologue, the Academy Awards had their worst-ever television ratings. As Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro stated at the time, the poor showing could only be due to the prevalence of far-left politics:

Since the end of the first Bush term, then, Hollywood has decided that Americans are rubes. If Americans like a product, that’s because the product must be too bourgeois. Hollywood must use its special night to demonstrate to Americans just how gauche they really are.

And so, each year, that’s what Hollywood does. They live off the profits of Thor: Ragnorak while bragging at the cocktail parties about Call Me By Your Name. They cash the checks from Star Wars: The Last Jedi while handing statuettes to The Shape of Water. And they fill their shows each year with lectures on intersectionality and “important” messages.

There’s a reason the ratings keep dropping at the Oscars. And it’s not merely because people haven’t been seeing the movies that win. It’s because Hollywood specifically chooses to reward movies that aren’t big hits so they can point out to the rubes just how ignorant they truly are.

And when Hollywood does approve a film that Americans like (see, e.g., Wonder Woman or Black Panther), Americans are told that something historic has happened — even though Americans have routinely enjoyed films that carry virtuous messages. Americans just don’t like being patronized. And Hollywood’s entire sense of value rests in their belief that Americans are worth sneering at — even when Hollywood is attempting to move beyond one of the worst scandals in its history.