Providing the first of these numerous “Donald Trump makes a bizarre staffing choice” stories to provoke a “Hey, that’s fun!’ reaction from us, instead of the usual, dread-soaked “Jesus Christ,” The Daily Mail is alleging that Sylvester Stallone may have been offered a place in the president-elect’s administration. According to The Mail—whose general journalistic standards suggest we should probably take this whole thing with a huge, musclebound grain of salt—Stallone has supposedly been offered a job as the head of the National Endowment For The Arts, the government body that issues grant money to artists.
Stallone—who most recently appeared on screens in last year’s Creed—last got into politics in 2008, when he supported John McCain’s campaign against Barack Obama. Last year, though, he expressed to Variety his admiration for Trump as a “larger than life,” “Dickensian” figure. (Which makes a certain sense, at least in terms of Trump’s devotion to his own myth and cult of personality, although it’s worth noting that Oliver Twist would have been a very different book if the first scene had been Oliver getting a massive loan from his real estate mogul dad.) Stallone did also question whether those same traits were what we wanted “running the country,” though, which seems like exactly the sort of half-visible slight that would earn a guy a presidential Twitter beatdown, and not an appointment to high office in the Trump administration.
UPDATE: Now Deadline is corroborating The Daily Mail’s story, with a vague “sources” saying that Stallone has been offered the position of head of the National Endowment for the Arts, and “is mulling it.” Those “sources” could be the same ones that tattled to The Daily Mail, or they could be The Daily Mail itself, or they could be some guy at a bar making shit up, or they could be legit. Deadline’s not saying who they are, so we don’t know. It doesn’t really matter in our “post-truth” society, regardless.