It has been six months since Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election. Six months. Half a year. Long enough to have a baby if you started on Election Night. Long enough to watch an entire NFL season and complain about the refs. Long enough, you would think, for a multimillionaire actress to sit down with a cup of oat milk and maybe, just maybe, figure out why the nice lady from the vibes campaign got absolutely waxed.
And yet here is Elizabeth Banks — star of “Pitch Perfect,” net worth approximately $50 million, last seen in a movie most of us didn’t pay to watch — telling the New York Post yesterday that she “cannot wrap her head” around white women who voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris. She cannot wrap her head around it. The head, you see, will not wrap. The wrapping mechanism of the Banks cranium is jammed. Please send a technician.
## Let Us Translate This For You
What Elizabeth Banks is actually saying, in English, is this: “I, a woman who has not personally looked at a grocery receipt since the Bush administration, find it baffling that other women — women with jobs and husbands and three kids and a Honda Pilot that needs new brake pads — chose the candidate who was not promising to make their life 20% more expensive on purpose.”
That’s the quote. That’s the whole quote. Everything else is just set dressing.
Because here’s the thing the Elizabeth Banks of the world cannot process, and will never process, and will go to their graves refusing to process: the women who voted for Trump did not vote against Kamala Harris because they hate women. They voted against Kamala Harris because Kamala Harris was the sitting Vice President of an administration that turned a gallon of milk into a luxury item. They voted against her because gas was $4, groceries were insane, the border looked like a Sam’s Club on Black Friday, and the answer from the White House was always some variation of “actually, you’re doing great, please clap.”
They didn’t need a policy briefing. They had a Costco receipt.
## The Hollywood Grief Tour, Stage 1: Still Denial
We are now six months out from the election, and if you’re keeping score at home, the famous Kübler-Ross five stages of grief go: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
Hollywood has not made it to Stage 2.
They are still parked at the curb of Stage 1, engine running, refusing to get out of the car. Every week another one of them shows up on a podcast or a red carpet or a late night couch and says the same three things in rotation: I don’t understand it, the voters were tricked, and racism. That’s the entire menu. Soup, salad, or breadsticks — except all three are the same thing and none of it fills you up.
Meanwhile, the actual Democratic Party is out here writing “autopsy reports” thicker than the phone book, hiring consultants, workshopping new branding, and quietly admitting that maybe — maybe — telling 75 million people they were Nazis for wanting cheaper gas was a tactical error. The party is trying to learn. The celebrities are still screaming at the scoreboard.
And you know who the celebrities are screaming at? Not the donor class. Not the consultants. Not the candidate who couldn’t finish a sentence without saying “unburdened by what has been.” No — they’re screaming at the Nurse Linda from Toledo who clocks 12-hour shifts and decided her paycheck was more important than Elizabeth Banks’s feelings.
That’s the villain. Nurse Linda.
## The Math Elizabeth Banks Will Not Do
We are going to do a little math that the $50 million actress apparently cannot do herself.
Median household income in America: about $75,000. Median home price: roughly $420,000. Average monthly grocery bill for a family of four under the Biden-Harris years: went from around $900 to over $1,300 before leveling off somewhere north of sanity. Average mortgage payment when interest rates doubled: up hundreds of dollars a month, every month, forever.
Elizabeth Banks’s monthly grocery bill: irrelevant, because she has a chef. Her mortgage: paid off, probably with the check from one “Hunger Games” movie. Her gas prices: irrelevant, she has a driver or a Tesla or both. Her concern about crime in her neighborhood: irrelevant, she lives behind a gate with a guard who has a gun, which is of course the only kind of gun she approves of.
So when the Costco mom in Michigan walks into the voting booth and picks the guy who says “I’ll drill, I’ll cut taxes, I’ll close the border, and I’ll make your groceries cheaper,” she is not confused. She is not tricked. She is not voting against her own interests. She is voting *directly* and *precisely* for her own interests — because her interests are feeding her kids, not validating the emotional state of a woman whose closest brush with grocery inflation was when her assistant mentioned it in passing.
The only person confused in this transaction is Elizabeth Banks.
## The Part Where They Actually Tell You Who They Think You Are
Here’s the kicker, and this is the part we want you to sit with.
When a celebrity says, “I can’t understand why you voted that way,” what they are actually saying — and they know they are saying it, and they say it on purpose — is: “You are stupid, and I am not, and the correct move would have been to defer to me.”
That’s the whole thing. That’s the brand. That’s the entire Democratic messaging apparatus of the last ten years distilled into a single sentence. Every Hollywood monologue. Every View episode. Every Saturday Night Live cold open. Every “if you vote for him you’re a racist” tweet. Every celebrity PSA where seven actors you recognize from commercials tell you to “just vote.” It is all — every single molecule of it — built on the assumption that you are a confused little peasant who needs a famous person to tell you what to think.
And then they wonder why you don’t like them.
We’ll tell them why, for free, one more time: we don’t like you because you don’t like us. We don’t like you because you call us racists for disagreeing on tax policy. We don’t like you because you lectured us about democracy while running a candidate nobody voted for in a primary. And we don’t like you because, six months after getting clobbered in an election that wasn’t close, your biggest contribution to the national conversation is “I still can’t believe those dummies didn’t listen to me.”
Wrap your head around that one, Elizabeth. Take your time. We’ll be at Costco.
