Trump divides the porn industry. He also might ban it.

On Tuesday, November 5, Donald Trump secured a second term as President of the United States. While Trump won the Electoral College comfortably, the popular vote was much closer, with Trump winning just 50 percent (compared to Harris’s 48.3 percent) — a remarkably slim margin.

This signals something we already know: Our communities are deeply divided regardless of which industry you work in or the demographic group you’re a part of. The porn industry — which has been in the spotlight more than years past thanks to a far-right proposal to ban explicit content — is no exception.

“I think that the industry has always been hard to pin down ideologically. There are people in the industry who are very progressive and there are people who are very conservative, despite the fact that we’re dealing with sex and sexuality,” Mike Stabile, director of public policy for the Free Speech Coalition — a trade association for the adult entertainment industry — told Mashable.

“I think that sometimes seeing people voice support for a candidate that is infringing on our livelihoods and making things less safe, I think it does come as a bit of a surprise sometimes to performers,” performer Renee Olstead said.

Tensions have escalated among performers on social media platforms publicly in recent weeks, as well as in emails and text messages obtained by Mashable. This comes amid new questions about how President-elect Donald Trump will treat the porn industry. Some Trump loyalists want porn outlawed and its creators imprisoned — while some within the porn industry voted for him.

Will Trump ban porn?

If the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation gets its way, the answer is yes. The foundation is behind Project 2025, a far-right conservative wish list for the next Trump term.  One of the measures calls for an outright pornography ban. 

While Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 during the campaign, he has already made key appointments of prominent Project 2025 authors and advisors since his win. 

President-elect Trump said his deputy chief of staff for policy will be Stephen Miller, who was featured prominently in a Project 2025 ad. He is the founder of America First Legal Foundation, a group that sat on the advisory board of Project 2025 at the time of its publication. Tom Homan is set to be appointed as White House border czar. He is one of the authors of Project 2025 as is John Ratcliffe, Trump’s nominee for CIA director. This week, Trump nominated yet another Project 2025 author, Brendan Carr, to lead the Federal Communications Commission.

In 2021, Vice President-elect JD Vance said he would get behind an outright ban on porn.

Despite these appointments, some factors are working against such a ban — which is why some performers told us that they’re not too worried as Mashable previously reported.

In 2016, Trump signed a pledge that called on him to ban adult entertainment, which didn’t happen. And if Trump did decide to move forward with a porn ban this time, his administration would still run into significant hurdles. 

To outright ban pornography, he would need help from Congress and the Supreme Court to redefine what porn is due to a case in 1973 that defined what “obscenity” means and was upheld by another case in 1985 that said that banned material must fit outside “only normal, healthy sexual desires.” Ultimately, the highest court has the last word on what is “obscene” and thus not protected by the First Amendment. 

Fringe Republicans in Congress have already tried to get around this by trying to “ban” porn — limit access — several times on the federal level in the last few years alone, and none of these efforts materialized.

Utah Senator Mike Lee, for example, introduced The Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA) and Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN) in 2022. The combined legislation would have broadened the definition of porn and expanded age-verification laws, which force sites to require ID to enter if over a third of the content they host is explicit. Neither bill made it past the House Subcommittee on Innovation, Data, and Commerce. The SCREEN Act was reintroduced in the most recent legislative session, but it met the same fate. 

At the state level, it’s a different story. Far-right conservatives in states like Texas and Indiana have been able to successfully push age-verification laws, a move that privacy experts say is a trojan horse for privacy violations. “We’re essentially creating this immediate requirement for people to share their private information alongside their pornography preference with companies that don’t necessarily have a system in place to protect that data,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jason Kelley told Mashable in 2023.

Since some states introduced these laws, porn sites have pulled out their services from the state saying that essentially, the risk is not worth their time. Pornhub is no longer available in states like Texas, for example.

“In some ways, these states have made it so difficult and so potentially hazardous for companies to operate in a state that they would pull out entirely,” Stabile said.

In a secret recording, Project 2025 author Russell Vought suggested that’s the point. “We’ve got a number of states that are passing this…and you know what happens is the porn company then says, ‘We’re not going to do business in your state.’ Which of course is entirely what we were after, right?” he said, according to The Intercept. Vought also said, “We’d have a national ban on pornography if we could, right?” 

Trump has recently tapped Vought to return to lead the Office of Management and Budget, a position he held during Trump’s first term.

Fighting back against porn bans

The existing age verification laws already face legal scrutiny. The Free Speech Coalition sued the state of Texas for what the advocacy group says is a First Amendment violation. The group said it’s taking the issue to the Supreme Court. 

Arguments are expected to begin in front of the court on January 15th. 

Mashable After Dark

The American Civil Liberties Union has also challenged these laws. 

“Adults in America have a First Amendment right to read about sexual health, see R-rated movies, watch porn, and otherwise access information about sex if they want to. They should be allowed to exercise that right as they see fit, without having to worry about exposing their personal identifying information in the process,” Vera Eidelman, staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project said in a release in September. 

The Trump transition team didn’t reply to our request for comment. 

Tensions bubble over in the porn industry 

While most sex workers planned to vote for Kamala Harris, according to research firm SWR Data, Trump supporters were a strong contingent. The stark political divide, along with the high stakes and open questions, is now a recipe for open hostility. And after election night, tensions began to boil over inside the porn industry.

Em Indica, a liberal-leaning performer, created a running Google Doc of Trump-supporting performers only days after election night. 

“I think people deserve to know who they’re working with and what they’re saying online. People need to be held accountable,” Indica told Mashable.

“This is not about disagreeing on things like economics. This is about moral choices. Women are being affected. Trans people are being affected. Minorities are being affected. He’s said terrible things about these groups,” Indica continued. “If they voted for Trump, they decided to look the other way when it came to his rape allegations [and] to him being a felon; just all the other stuff that they decided that was not a deal breaker for them. To me, that speaks volumes,” she added. 

Some opponents of the list see it as a way to shame conservative performers out of work.

“What we’re witnessing right now is a cultural shift of alienating people for their political beliefs, saying that these people are bad people to cut them off, to not work with them. It’s no different than saying white versus black, except for now it’s Kamala versus Trump,” performer Adira Allure told Mashable. 

Other conservative performers we spoke to, many of which opted not to be named, echoed her sentiment. 

Indica, however, defends her position. 

“People that say it puts a target on their back, then I just ask them why. They tweeted [their Trump support] out. They put it on the internet to begin with. People are entitled to their own opinion. If you don’t want to receive backlash, then don’t post it on the internet,” Indica said.

But it’s not just conservatives that have taken issue. A liberal-leaning performer, who opted to remain unnamed out of fear of retaliation, told Mashable that she disagrees with the list and thinks it’s counterproductive.

“It is going to push people to continue to vote red and to vote for people like Trump. It gives people who did vote for Trump to be like, ‘See, I told you,'” the liberal performer told Mashable.  

“It just perpetuates the same hate that we’re supposed to be fighting against,” she added.

Not all performers who identify as conservative see the list as a bad thing. 

“It [is] free promotion. So I appreciate her making it,” Ashley Sinclair, a very outspoken pro-Trump performer, told Mashable. 

Sinclair, who uses platforms including OnlyFans, said, “Instead of losing money, sales, clients, it immediately increased with this type of content and cam shows.” Sinclair didn’t provide data to Mashable to support her claims. 

A well-known male performer, who identifies as a political moderate, told Mashable that he believes in the porn industry, there is a silent majority that leans to the right and does not say so publicly out of fear of retaliation. 

The performer, who opted not to be named, however, spoke in vague terms so Mashable was unable to verify the legitimacy of his remarks independently. 

Mashable spoke to half a dozen performers who say the opposite, signaling the divide amongst the porn industry is as stark as the country as a whole. SWR Data also says the opposite but its findings are only based on a poll of around 200 sex workers.

The same firm has data to prove that potential political attacks from Project 2025 have fueled major concerns among adult content creators, especially those within historically disenfranchised communities. Ninety-three percent of trans performers, 94 percent of creators of color, and all gay and lesbian creators voiced fears.

Many industry insiders were involved with a campaign called Hands Off My Porn which was supported by several top performers ahead of the election including Maddy May (who has since called for hostility amongst performers to stop), Remy LaCroix, and Allie Awesome. 

The campaign spent $200,000 on ads in swing states to raise awareness about Project 2025’s agenda and Trump’s connections with it. 

“I’m just really terrified of Project 2025…the fact that the existence of the Department of Education is already up for debate shows that [it’s] really insane,” performer Addis Fouché told Mashable. 

“I think people will find a way to do sex work and have sex regardless. You’re just going to make it more taboo and more unsafe,” she added. “I think it’ll change what restrictions we may have and how people are able to film, if at all, and how people see the industry.”

But amid the noise, the places that provide the work including production companies, modeling agencies, and distributors have been noticeably quiet. We reached out to several companies including Vixen Media Group, Adult Time, and Hussie Models — all of which declined to speak.

OnlyFans, valued at $18 billion, has more than 43 percent of its users in the United States as of publication. The company didn’t reply to our request for comment on this story.

If Project 2025 or anything close becomes the law of the land, it could cause a remarkable negative impact on these businesses — and thousands of people’s livelihoods.