Hollywood, liberal to its core, was shocked that Trump won.

Zip Code 90210 and environs has long been one of the Democratic Party’s most reliable ATM branches, the town where rich liberals can feel better about being rich by contributing to causes that prove their liberal bona fides and let them rub shoulders with real power. Celebrities like Magic Johnson, Seth MacFarlane, Lionel Richie and George Clooney—together with moguls like Jeffrey Katzenberg, Bob Iger, Haim Saban, Barry Diller and Michael Eisner—had held dozens of fundraisers for Clinton, or entertained for free to support her, over the past two years.

Hollywood’s top Democratic players were all set to watch one fellow liberal superstar, Barack Obama, pass the torch to another, Clinton herself. They were planning their inauguration parties, polishing their résumés and, in some cases, measuring the drapes in embassies around the world. Instead, they faced a shocking overnight reversal, as if a big budget movie that the tracking polls had guaranteed would be a blockbuster inexplicably tanked on opening weekend with no warning. A cadre of megastars and megadonors that had counted on four or eight more years of Access Washington, that has been happily benefiting from the psychic and social rewards of the increasing intermingling of celebrity culture and Democratic politics, suddenly found the door to the White House slammed squarely in its face.

And the rejection came with an extra, and especially scary, sting: It turned out that the industry supposedly known for having its finger on the popular pulse didn’t understand America—“red America,” the “real America,” the “rest of America”—at all.

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