Jon Voight Is About to Make Hollywood Say Thank You to Donald Trump

Jon Voight is 87, an Oscar winner, a diehard Trump man, and the president’s special ambassador to Hollywood, a town that spent a decade treating that president like a contagious disease. He has spent more than a year walking the same pitch into the White House: the American film and television business is leaking jobs overseas, the crews who built the industry are sitting at home, and a federal production tax credit would put cameras back on American soil. In late August, after Voight, his manager Steven Paul, and producer Scott Karol sat with the president, Trump did what Hollywood lobbyists had failed to extract for years. He sounded his opinion on the matter. Congress, he said, should “immediately” craft a federal production incentive to save the movie and television business in America.

The Motion Picture Association commissioned a study projecting that a transferable federal credit could mean more than $125 billion in additional U.S. production spending over nine years and tens of thousands of extra jobs in an average year. Voight told The Hollywood Reporter the thing is “the closest it’s ever gotten.” “We have an opening here, we have some sunlight, it’s going to happen,” he said. “If we get on an even keel with the rest of the world’s tax benefits… there’s going to be an explosion of energy. It will be immediate.” California should be first in line to take the win. It is not.

For years the story out of Los Angeles has been the same dirge: productions fleeing to Georgia, New York, Canada, the United Kingdom, anywhere the incentive math is less punishing than filming in the state that invented the business. Between 2020 and 2024, California is estimated to have lost roughly $1.6 billion in production spending because projects could not even get into the old, undersized credit program. Strikes, the pandemic, and the 2025 fires piled on. Governor Gavin Newsom eventually more than doubled the state film-and-TV credit to $750 million a year, then spent 2026 patching the program he had just expanded after his own budget mechanics threatened to cap and kneecap the credits producers were promised. That is not a renaissance. That is a governor playing catch-up in a hole he helped dig and then taking a bow on a soundstage.

Trump, for his part, has not been subtle about where the bleeding is worst. After the Voight meeting he called Hollywood a “complete and total disaster,” noted there is “no incentive to be there,” and added that the collapse is “hurting California very badly.” He even pointed at the politics: so much money is being lost in California and other blue states that the fix ought to be bipartisan. A Democratic congresswoman from a production district said she had been working the same idea with Voight for a year. The carpenters and drivers Voight keeps mentioning do not care which donkey or elephant is stamped on the check. They care whether the truck shows up Monday.

Here is the cultural problem, and it is more stubborn than any tax table. If a federal credit passes, Hollywood gets jobs, vendors get work, and California gets a floor under an industry Newsom has allowed to fester while he chased higher-profile fights. The price of that floor is gratitude or at least an honest sentence. Someone in a commissary would have to admit that Donald Trump and an old actor the industry treats as a family embarrassment delivered a policy the town had wanted since before streaming ate the calendar. For a lot of executives, donors, and awards-season moralists, that sentence is close to political hari-kari. Better to keep the soundstages half empty than to say the quiet part out loud: the man they blacklisted from the group might be the one who kept the group employed.

Voight is not pretending this is a purity test. He talks about content, crews, and the fact that the United States invented an industry the rest of the world fell in love with. Paul and Karol have been the mechanics—letters, meetings, a coalition of unions and studio people who discovered, to their own surprise, that they could sit in a room without a loyalty oath. Stallone and Mel Gibson got the same ambassador title; Voight is the one who stayed in the building until the president hit post. Rep. Brian Jack of Georgia put it bluntly: the evolution of the president’s direction on this “is because of Jon Voight.”

None of that means the bill is law. Congress still has to write it, fight over the rate, and decide whether “immediately” means this year or after the next fundraising cycle. California will still have high costs, high taxes, and a talent for snatching defeat from a credit program. A federal incentive does not wash Newsom’s record clean. It does mean that if Hollywood grows again on the back of that incentive, the origin story will not be a Sacramento press release. It will be an 87-year-old liaison who walked into the Oval Office and asked for a tax credit like it was a location permit.

The town can take the work and keep the sneer. It usually does. What it cannot do, if the credit lands, is keep pretending the bleak years were an act of God. They were a policy failure. Voight is trying to reverse it. The only remaining question is whether the people who would benefit most would rather stay righteous or stay employed.