At last Sunday’s Screen Actors Guild awards in Hollywood, barely anyone who got to the stage failed to denounce Donald Trump’s immigrant ban. Veep star Julia Louis-Dreyfus, for instance, accepting her award for outstanding performance by a female actor in a comedy series with her portrayal of a (with all due respect) venal and useless president, said: “I am the daughter of an immigrant. My father fled religious persecution in Nazi-occupied France, and I am an American patriot ... I love this country. I am horrified by its blemishes. This immigrant ban is a blemish, and it is un-American.”

Big Bang Theory star Simon Helberg posed with his wife, Jocelyn Towne, on the award ceremony’s red carpet, he with a teeny sign reading “Refugees welcome”, she with the words “Let them in”, written on her chest.

Best of all, David Harbour, star of Stranger Things, suggested that there was a parallel between the values of the hit Netflix retro-horror series and the battle against the new White House incumbent. “We … will repel bullies, we will shelter freaks and outcasts, those who have no home, we will get past the lies, we will hunt monsters.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Big Bang Theory’s Simon Helberg and his wife, Jocelyn Towne. Photograph: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

It was as if Hollywood was lining up at the start of a new culture war against the man America has or, if you have a voguish post-truth take on the US electoral system, hasn’t, elected president. As for Harbour’s speech, we all know what he means about sheltering freaks and outcasts, but was the monsters line implicitly suggesting that Trump is akin to the hideous thing nicknamed Demogorgon from a parallel dimension called Upside Down who, early in season one, Winona Ryder’s Joyce Byers manages to outrun after he breaks through her house wall? It’s not impossible.

To be sure, not every entertainer is singing from the same anti-Trump hymn sheet. Last weekend, for instance, Roseanne Barr, tweeted “HAHAHAHAHA”. The American actor, comedian and 2012 presidential nominee for the Peace and Freedom party, was responding to a report that the Iranian film director Asghar Farhadi won’t be let into the US to attend next month’s Academy awards, at which his film The Salesman is nominated for best foreign-language picture.

It looked, for a sickening moment, as though Barr was revelling in a Muslim being kept out of the US, thanks to Trump’s visa ban on citizens from Iran and six other predominantly Muslim countries. Farhadi is hardly a jihadist of western nightmares, but rather a globally feted filmmaker whose work has already been celebrated in the US (Sandra Bullock presented him with the best foreign-language-film Oscar in 2012 for A Separation). “Why are you laughing, Roseanne?” went one counter-tweet. “I ask this as a fan of your amazing TV series from the 1990s.” Barr tweeted back: “they will blame trump, but they could get the guy in for the awards-they don’t 4 politix”.

Barr had a point. It’s possible that the US could have granted Farhadi an exemption to Trump’s visa ban. But Barr’s deeper argument, namely that Hollywood is so overrun by Trump-hating liberals that they are using Farhadi as a poster boy against the president’s ban on Muslims, typifies what Trump-era “politix” is – rage, uncorroborated conspiracy theories, name-calling, caps-lock sarcasm and bad grammar.

From Tehran came something calmer. Farhadi issued a statement saying he wouldn’t be attending the Oscars even if the US allowed him in. He went on to draw parallels between the ayatollahs of the Islamic republic and the 45th US president. “In order to understand the world, they have no choice but to regard it via an ‘us-and-them’ mentality, which they use to create a fearful image of ‘them’ and inflict fear on the people of their own countries,” Farhadi wrote. “This is not just limited to the United States; in my country, hardliners are the same.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Iranian director Asghar Farhadi. Photograph: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images

What Barr’s tweets and Farhadi’s statement demonstrate is that we’re at the start of a new culture war; an ideological split between Trump and his climate-change denying, histrionically patriotic, philistine, misogynistic, racist, post-truth, moronic supporters (to describe them in their opponents’ words) and snowflakes with their mimsy, I’d-like-to-teach-the-world-to-sing, testosterone-free loser liberalism (to describe Trump’s foes in their opponents’ favoured terms). It’s a war that is opening up on many fronts – music, cinema, literature, celebrity, science, sport.

Let’s start with music. Last Monday, during the Australian leg of his world tour, Bruce Springsteen told a crowd in Adelaide: “Tonight, we wanted to add our voices to the thousands of Americans who are protesting, in airports around our country, the Muslim ban and detention of foreign nationals and refugees. America is a nation of immigrants, and we find this anti-democratic and fundamentally un-American.” He then launched into American Land, which he called an “immigrant song”.

Another Trump-detesting singer, Lily Allen, was moved to cover Rufus Wainwright’s beautiful Going to a Town, in which the American-Canadian indicted the US in words that take on new pertinence today. Wainwright sang: “I’m going to a town that has already been burnt down / I’m going to a place that has already been disgraced / I’m gonna see some folks who have already been let down / I’m so tired of America …” The suggestion was that, while other countries had had their hubris destroyed thanks to meditating on their shameful histories (think Germany’s genocidal Third Reich; Britain’s wretched empire), the US was tiresome precisely because it hadn’t been bathed in the healing flames of national disgrace. How could one but be tired by a country whose national myth, now disinterred by Trump, denied its manifold historical disgraces (slavery, Jim Crow, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, among others)? Make America great again, Mr President? Like it was before? Please.

In this new culture war, celebrities and creatives are on the front line. Kim Kardashian responded to Trump’s refugee ban by tweeting statistics. According to the figures she cited, on average 21 Americans are killed each year by armed toddlers and 69 by lawnmowers, but only two by jihadist immigrants. When is Trump going to issue an executive order banning tooled-up toddlers and out-of-control garden equipment?

During a speech at the women’s march in Washington, Madonna said: “Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House. But I know this won’t change anything.” Those words were twisted by Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus: “One of the singers said she wanted to blow up the White House. I mean, can you imagine saying that about President Obama?” Madonna later told Instagram her words had been taken out of context. “I spoke in metaphor, and I shared two ways of looking at things – one was to be hopeful, and one was to feel anger and outrage, which I have personally felt,” adding that really she was proposing a “revolution of love”, which isn’t on Trump’s agenda.

What is on his agenda is a revolution against liberal-celebrity culture. Yes, the lame-stream liberal media may love to parade the names of the great and the good who attended Obama’s inauguration in 2009 (Beyoncé, Stevie Wonder, Shakira, Springsteen, Denzel Washington, Jamie Foxx, Steve Carell, Tom Hanks, Queen Latifah, Tiger Woods, Forest Whitaker, Samuel L Jackson, Renée Fleming, Mary J Blige) and contrast them with the and-who-are-they-agains? who graced Trump’s post-inauguration Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration (Toby Keith, 3 Doors Down, The Frontmen of Country among others) in order to show what a bunch of barbarians the current president and his acolytes are. But Trump and his supporters are undaunted by that kind of slur.

If there is a culture war going on, Trump and his supporters are fighting against culture, at least against culture as personified by the celebs and creatives who appointed themselves their homeland’s consciences. That’s why Barr speaks dismissively of “hollywooders”, and why Trump took on Meryl Streep. When he attacked the actor on Twitter for her speech attacking him (though not by name) at the Golden Globes, it looked like the graceless bleat of the bully who needs to grow a thicker skin. But it was also something else: an ostensibly plain-speaking American Republican’s takedown of Hollywood’s self-regarding aristocracy.

But what of the other side in the culture war? Are there really no celebrities prepared to put their heads over the parapet to support Trump’s reforms? Yes: Hulk Hogan, Jon Voight, Ted Nugent, Mike Tyson, Dennis Rodman and Loretta Lynn have been cited as Trump supporters. And, yes, Kanye West did stun fans at a gig before Christmas by saying that he didn’t vote in the presidential election, but, if he had, he would have voted Trump. (You would like to think Kanye might have abandoned this stance had he seen his wife’s statistical breakdown of garden-machinery-related deaths). But, with the exception of Barr (the comedian now farms nuts in Hawaii, by the way), these putative celebrity allies have hardly stood shoulder to shoulder with the new administration at this difficult time. It has been left to the president and all the president’s men and women to defend the policies emerging from the Oval Office. Even the reliably gobby 86-year-old Clint Eastwood (who last August told Esquire that America’s “pussy generation” needed to “just fucking get over” Donald Trump’s “racism”) has been disappointingly reticent in recent weeks. Perhaps what the president should do is sell off his Scottish golf resorts to bankroll any celebrity supporters willing to stand up for him.

Liberal Hollywood’s response to Trump’s attempted takedown, naturally, has been to double down on representing the views of those alienated by the new administration and unable to make their voices heard. Thus, conservative American’s long-time nemesis, 79-year-old actor Jane Fonda denounced Trump as “predator-in-chief” during a protest in New York last week for greenlighting the construction of two controversial pipelines through the Standing Rock Reservation. Scarlett Johansson spoke at the women’s march opposing the Trump administration’s promised cuts to Planned Parenthood’s funding.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Scarlett Johansson attends the Women’s March. Photograph: Noam Galai/WireImage

It’s not just actors and musicians who are supplanting politicians as Trump’s effective opposition. What many took as Theresa May’s unprincipled political expediency in failing to quickly condemn Trump’s visa ban on Muslims contrasted with Sir Mo Farah’s stance. The Somalia-born British athlete, who came to Britain aged eight and won four gold Olympic medals in London and Rio, wrote that his own life “story is an example of what can happen when you follow policies of compassion and understanding not hate and isolation”. If only his prime minister could have spoken from the heart rather than the wallet.

In this culture war, truth is the first casualty, and its murder by Trump’s foot soldiers goes a long way to accounting for the renewed bestseller status of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (along with other books that now look to many like unwitting predictions of Trump’s rule, such as Huxley’s Brave New World and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here). The presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway claimed on NBC’s Meet the Press last month that the new White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, hadn’t lied to reporters about the size of the inaugural crowd at Trump’s inauguration. Rather, he had presented them with “alternative facts”, or, as they’re otherwise known, lies. Orwellian Newspeak is back, baby.

The coarsening and cheapening of political discourse under Trump has drawn the novelist Philip Roth from the silence of his retirement. Asked by the New Yorker if Trump’s election was akin to the premise of his 2004 novel The Plot Against America (in which Roth imagined the aviator Charles Lindbergh as a demagogue who defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the 1940 presidential election and then leads his homeland into an alliance with Hitler), Roth demurred. “It is easier to comprehend the election of an imaginary president like Charles Lindbergh than an actual president like Donald Trump. Lindbergh, despite his Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities, was a great aviation hero who had displayed tremendous physical courage and aeronautical genius in crossing the Atlantic in 1927. He had character and he had substance … Trump is just a con artist.”

For Roth, none of the president’s Republican predecessors was as “humanly impoverished” as Trump is, “ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognising subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of 77 words that is better called Jerkish than English”.

Later this year, scientists plan to march against the Trump administration in Washington. The protest is in response to the Trump administration’s denial of climate change, its fossil-fuel fixated energy policy and its desire to silence the national organisations that track the effects of global warming.

“There are certain things that we accept as facts with no alternatives,” begins the mission statement of those behind the Scientists’ March on Washington: “The Earth is becoming warmer due to human action. The diversity of life arose by evolution.” Trump and his vice-president, Mike Pence, by contrast, doubt humans’ role in global warming and the theory of evolution. Now, the scientists fear, they are trying to silence those who don’t share their views. “Social media and the halls of scientific institutions are now abuzz with scientists upset about an administration trying to muzzle the facts that don’t agree with certain political agendas,” Professor Anthony D Barnosky of Stanford University told the Guardian recently. He went on: “Filtering the findings of the nation’s government scientists, who are among the best and brightest, and whose work is paid for by taxpayer dollars, goes counter to everything America stands for.”

But what does America stand for? One hopeful answer is the revolutionary power of derision. The incoming Trump administration’s retooled newspeak has been made ridiculous by becoming a meme. When Mike D’Antoni of the Houston Rockets was asked why his basketball team had lost five of their past eight games, he replied: “Actually we won all those games. I’m going with that alternative-fact thing.” Pizza chain Villa Italian Kitchen last week a new zero-calorie #AlternativeFacts pizza topped with bacon, pepperoni, ham and sausage.

I'm a Muslim video-game developer. The US no longer feels open for business Read more

But let’s not get carried away with the idea that satire is the decisive weapon in the culture war. Last year, Malcolm Gladwell released a podcast called The Satire Paradox, in which he argued that political comedy often has the reverse effect. He cited Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney, “a vicious sendup of the typical Thatcherite nouveau riche buffoon. People loved it. And what happened? Exactly the opposite of what Enfield hoped would happen.” Gladwell’s point was that satire can be politically toothless. If he’s right, then the Trump administration’s post-truth philosophy, if that’s not too strong a word, can survive all the satirical derision currently being heaped on it, perhaps even emerge stronger.

Meanwhile, the Oscars take place on 26 February. What can we expect? Now the Iranians aren’t coming (not only is the director of The Salesman not going to be in Hollywood, but its star, Taraneh Alidoosti, has vowed to boycott awards in protest at Trump’s visa ban), the musical La La Land is likely to dominate.

Why is that significant? In lots of ways, La La Land is a charming film. In others, though, it is emblematic of what America risks becoming under Trump. At one point, white jazz buff Ryan Gosling explains at eye-rolling length to his date Emma Stone why she mustn’t hate jazz, and then talks loudly over African-American musicians as they play music he ostensibly adores. As Newsweek’s film critic recently wrote, what could be more fitting in Trump’s 2017 than a movie involving mansplaining and whitewashing? What could be more appropriate today than a nostalgic movie appropriating the moves of previous musicals with all the brazen cheek of Melania Trump plagiarising one of Michelle Obama’s speeches? Unwittingly, the president’s enemy, Hollywood, is giving the Trump era the movie it deserves.