Departure of the Beautiful People

OPINION:

The beautiful people, who never imagine that bad things can happen to them, are undone by the triumph of Donald Trump. The French ambassador to the United States thinks Tuesday was the beginning of the end of the planet itself.

“After Brexit,” Ambassador Gerard Araud tweeted — undiplomatically, one might say — to one and all after the battleground states fell like dominoes on election night, “the world is collapsing before our eyes.” He later withdrew the tweet, perhaps after advice from the home office in Paris.

There’s new noise, lights and action at Los Angeles International Airport, where the sight of a tinsel celebrity surprises no one, and where some of the beautiful people appear to be trying to get aboard actor Alec Baldwin’s airplane.

The plane, which recalls the last flight out of “Casablanca,” has apparently been idling on the tarmac since election night of 2004, when Mr. Baldwin was thought to be making good on his threat to leave America if George W. Bush was re-elected president. The pilot of the Boeing 707 has apparently been waiting for the tower to clear it for take-off all these years, because Mr. Baldwin, who frequently stands in for Donald Trump on “Saturday Night Live,” is still here. This must be true because Mr. Baldwin would never tell a fib.

After the Donald’s stunning upset of Hillary Clinton, a new class of Hollywood stars, including several whose star power has dimmed a bit, are eager to join a flight to oblivion, or at least Kansas City. “I know a lot of people have been threatening to do this,” says Lena Dunham, the creator and star of the HBO hit ’Girls,’ but I really will.”

Samuel L. Jackson says the Donald’s “hate-filled campaign” is driving him to a new life in South Africa, and the actress Cher says she’s moving to the planet Jupiter, which might require changing planes in Atlanta. Barbra Streisand, once a favorite at the Clinton White House (more popular with Bubba than with Hillary), says she will settle for Canada. Amy Schumer is headed for Spain and is looking for a language tutor. “My act will change because I will need to learn to speak Spanish.”

The comedienne Chelsea Handler says she has already bought a house in another country. She has no patience with people who make empty threats. “All these people that threaten to leave the country and then don’t — I actually will leave the country.”

Jon Stewart, once the host of the “Daily Show” and appears to be “between engagements,” as the idle said in vaudeville, would consider “getting in a rocket and going to another planet and go to another planet, because clearly this planet has gone bonkers.” George Lopez, a Hispanic comedian, perhaps trying to soothe the disappointment of an adoring public, says President Trump “won’t have to worry about immigration” after the Los Angeles Airlift because “we’re all going back.”

Miley Cyrus earlier posted an Instagram warning that she was “unbelievably scared” at the prospect of a Trump presidency and “I am moving if he is the president. I don’t say things I don’t mean.”

Of course none of this may actually come to pass. Hollywood is the dream factory, after all, and the practitioners of the arts of make-believe are accustomed to saying words written for them by someone else. But there’s a lot of freaking out in Tinseltown, and the Donald is entitled to the credit for that, too.