Bad news: Matt Damon might be leaving the U.S. because of Trump

Probably not true. But with the exception of his pal Clooney, there may be no A-lister who takes his progressive virtue more seriously than Damon. (Mark Ruffalo isn’t A-list, silly.) If you were going to gamble on one actor to actually follow through on ye olde “I’m leaving the country if my candidate loses” empty threat, this is who you’d gamble on.

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I will not miss him. In fact, if this starts a trend of Hollywood jagoffs decamping from America in protest, it’ll make for a nice cheap populist applause line for POTUS on the trail in 2020. “I made the limousine liberals leave!” Even I’m getting a little MAGA buzz thinking about that.

Making America great again starts with making it a little less smug:

Damon, 47, reportedly has purchased a property in Byron Bay, New South Wales, according to Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph. The home’s next door to a place owned by Chris Hemsworth — with whom Damon recently appeared in “Thor: Ragnarok.”

A source exclusively tells Page Six: “Matt’s telling friends and colleagues in Hollywood that he’s moving the family to Australia” because the activist actor disagrees with Trump’s policies. The president’s frequently butted heads with liberal Hollywood A-listers including Meryl Streep. The source added, “Matt’s saying the move will not impact his work — as he will travel to wherever his projects are shooting. He’s also telling friends he wants to have a safe place to raise his kids.” Damon has four children with wife Luciana Barroso.

Matt Damon, a man with the resources to afford a home literally anywhere in America, can’t find “a safe place to raise his kids” here? Unlikely. In fact, Gossip Cop claims the whole thing is nonsense:

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There’s nothing accurate about any of this. A rep for Damon exclusively tells Gossip Cop the actor has not purchased a home in Australia. As for the bogus Trump angle, that aspect was seemingly concocted because the outspoken actor has voiced his disapproval of the president on several occasions. Not only is New York Post’s ridiculously wrong article based on a false premise, but it’s also filled with additional made-up details.

Even if he did want to get out of Dodge, it’s probably not because of Trump. He’s been hearing it from the left off and on for months for his somewhat-less-than-ideal progressivism on #MeToo issues. He’s an old Harvey Weinstein buddy, remember. And in December he spoke up on Al Franken’s behalf, noting that Franken’s misdeeds were minor compared to what most other villains of the #MeToo moment have been accused of. A month later he’d taken enough heat that he was telling interviewers, “I should get in the backseat and close my mouth for a while.” If you were a liberal who was “only” 98 percent pure in your progressivism and were being regularly reminded of that other two percent, you might want to move to the other side of the planet too.

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Here’s what I think probably happened. Someone overheard Damon talking about the Parkland fallout and U.S. gun laws. He said something offhand about how kids aren’t safe in America and compared the country unfavorably to Australia, where the government famously enacted a mandatory gun buyback program in the 1990s after a mass shooting there. Damon’s a big fan of gun confiscation. Possibly he joked that he was moving there if Trump didn’t pass some draconian new gun law soon, the eavesdropper took it literally and passed it on to Page Six, and voila.

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 21, 2024
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