Should Trump Enablers Be Ostracized? We Asked an Actress on the Hollywood Blacklist

Lee Grant was shut out of work for 12 years—and she cautions against snubbing the president’s loyalists

Sidney Poitier and Lee Grant in a scene from ‘In the Heat of the Night’ (1967). Photo: Mondadori Portfolio/Getty

In early November, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a tweet wondering whether anyone was “archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future.” At the time, it seemed obvious the president’s enablers would eventually come to regret their association with one of the most pernicious regimes in American history. They’d try to move on, furiously deleting tweets, editing Wikipedia pages, or attempting a pasodoble on Dancing With the Stars as they scrambled to maintain a grip on public life.

In the replies to AOC’s tweet, Hari Sevugan, Pete Buttigieg’s former press secretary, said he was helping spearhead something called the Trump Accountability Project, which aimed to create the “definitive factual record of those who enabled the Trump era,” per the project’s website. Critics likened the scheme to a Nixonian “enemies list,” a Stalinist purge, and a return to the bad old days of the Hollywood blacklist. A week later, “in the spirit of the President-elect’s call to build a more united country,” the site was quietly shut down.