Buttigieg to Democrats: Picture life after Trump; Republicans already are
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The U.S. military deployed on the streets of America. Whole communities targeted for removal.
And when accountability finally came knocking, the Burn Order to cover it all up.
So much to get to tonight. I have sitting here right across the table from me, Secretary, Mayor, I call them both, Pete Buttigieg. There's so many things to talk with him about. Few people whose perspective I would want to hear more in this moment than his. We're going to get to that in just a moment. There's a lot I've been thinking about today, and one of them is this. In politics, we spend a lot of time reading tea leaves, all sorts of tea leaves, trying to get a sense of which way the political winds may be blowing. And right now, no matter what tea leaves you look at, I mean, very unrelated tea leaves, the message is the same. Nobody likes what the Trump administration is doing right now. I mean, take, for example, First Lady Melania Trump's new movie, Melania.
That's what it's called. The documentary about the First Lady in the days leading up to her husband's second inauguration has had, it is a supersized, ginormous worldwide marketing campaign that has been put behind it. Amazon, which produced the film, has spent $35 million marketing the film. And just to give you a sense on how enormous that budget is, that is 10 times higher than the marketing budget of some of the biggest documentaries in the past decade. There are Melania movie billboards and bus ads and nationally broadcast commercials during NFL playoff games. The film was even advertised on the notoriously expensive Las Vegas Sphere. You can see Melania covering the Sphere in Las Vegas there.
literally one of the most expensive advertising spaces in the world. And this morning, Melania rang the opening bell for the New York Stock Exchange to promote the film, as one does, I suppose, of documentaries. And of course, her husband used the bully pulpit of the White House and his social media accounts with more than 100 million followers to promote the film. Now, here's what he posted on Monday. Melania, the movie, is a must-watch. Get your tickets today, selling out fast. And then there's a link to buy tickets, literally, in this thing at your local theater. But even with all that promotion, $35 million of ads, the sphere, the stock exchange, Trump aggressively encouraging more than 100 million of his Truth Social, 11 million Truth Social followers, 100 million followers overall to get their tickets today.
It turns out it is not telling out fast, really, at all.
How did Melania Trump’s documentary flop reveal public sentiment toward the administration?
I mean, this weekend, trade groups are estimating the film will only sell somewhere between $1 and $5 million worth of tickets in the U.S. So if you're kind of going to have to be a mathematician here, for a film Amazon paid Melania Trump $40 million for and then spent $35 million in addition, promoting $75 million, That's how much they spent. Now, in the UK, one of the chief executives of one of the nation's biggest movie theater chains told The Guardian earlier this week that they had only sold one, one, one singular ticket for the premiere screening of the film at the chain's flagship London Bridge. One. In Australia, one of their largest chains has similarly only sold one, again, one singular pre-sale ticket so far.
That's a total of two from those two locations. Even in Palm Beach, Florida, home to Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club, the Regal Cinema location in Palm Beach has reportedly only sold 13% of the tickets for the opening weekend of Melania's film. Tomorrow, the film premieres at the Kennedy Center, and on Friday, it opens in 1,700 theaters nationwide and another 1,600 theaters globally. But again, contrary to what Trump says, those theaters do not appear to be selling out fast. In fact, it looks like not even the MAGA diehard crowd, the crowd that buys Trump's sneakers, the gold ones, and Trump crypto, lots of it, and Trump branded Bibles, of all things, because clearly he's the best representative of that, doesn't seem even like that crowd is going to go see this movie.
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