Donald Trump and the politics of Netflix

Given that there’s apparently no aspect of American life where culture wars don’t rage, the only surprise about Netflix’s latest controversy is that it hasn’t been going on for at least three years. After all, this is a company whose CEO, Reed Hastings, called for a Hillary landslide in 2016, because ‘Trump would destroy much of what made America great’.

The reason #boycottnetflix was trending earlier this month on you-know-where is that Netflix announced that it would ‘rethink’ filming in Georgia if the state’s new abortion law went ahead. But the first rumblings of conservative anger towards the company came in May 2018 when its chief content officer Ted Sarandos, a former fundraiser for Obama, unveiled a multi-year deal between Netflix and Barack and Michelle’s new production company, which would provide new films and television programmes for the streaming giant. Sarandos’s assurances that there’d be ‘no political slate to the programming’ felt distinctly disingenuous at the time.