Alan Ritchson built his career playing a man who solves problems with his fists and doesn’t care who gets in the way.
Off camera, though, the actor keeps picking a very different fight, this one with President Trump.
And now Ritchson just admitted why one of his favorite storylines never made it to the screen.
A Scrapped ‘Die Trying’ Adaptation
Ritchson stars as Jack Reacher in Amazon Prime Video’s hit series based on Lee Child’s novels, and he recently responded to a fan on Threads who expressed disappointment that the show still hadn’t adapted “Die Trying,” the second book in Child’s Reacher series. In the exchange, Ritchson said that they had attempted to adapt Die Trying, the 1998 book in the series, where he kills his way through a white supremacist militia camp.
The fan had written that every season of Reacher so far had been great, and understood that they may be avoiding the earlier novels due to their slightly less standalone nature, but every year felt sad to learn that next season wouldn’t be the book where he kills his way through a white supremacist militia camp.
Ritchson responded with a line that quickly went viral. “My favorite book. Fun fact: I had it approved until someone got re-elected,” Ritchson wrote as a reply. The actor never actually typed the words “Donald Trump,” but the timing left little room for guessing who he meant.
The novel follows Reacher infiltrating, escaping and dismantling an extremist mountain militia that plans to secede from the United States to form a white-only state. It’s a pulpy revenge thriller, the kind of book that made Lee Child a bestseller decades before Amazon ever turned Reacher into a streaming franchise.
Amazon has not confirmed a word of Ritchson’s account. A representative for Prime Video did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Ritchson’s claim. That hasn’t stopped the story from spreading across entertainment outlets as though it were established fact.
The post drew more than 73,000 likes on the platform within days, which tells you plenty about how eager a certain slice of the internet is to believe that Amazon executives are quietly steering a streaming show around Trump’s presidency.
Season 5 of Reacher is already in the works, with Canadian actors Jay Baruchel and Kevin Durand taking key roles, so there is plenty more of the franchise still to come. Whether “Die Trying” ever makes it to a future season remains an open question that only Amazon can answer, and so far Amazon isn’t talking.
Ritchson’s Long Running Feud With The President
This isn’t the first time Ritchson has used his platform to take a swing at Trump, and it likely won’t be the last. In a April 2024 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the actor went after Christian Trump supporters directly.
“Trump is a rapist and a con man, and yet the entire Christian church seems to treat him like he’s their poster child and it’s unreal. I don’t understand it,” Ritchson said. Those are his words, not an established legal finding, and readers should treat them as the actor’s personal opinion rather than a verdict from any court.
Ritchson has described facing backlash for comments like these. One month later, he claimed he was “met with violence” for sharing these and other views, adding that if you want to see violence flee the world, be more generous to everybody.
The actor picked the fight back up again this summer. On the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast in July, Ritchson tore into the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. “This is my f*cking politics, dude,” Ritchson said. “I would f*cking railroad these f*ckers I would get those Epstein files out in two seconds.”
He wasn’t finished there. “Don’t you want to see what’s in [the files] so that we can hold people accountable?” he asked host Josh Horowitz. “These f***ing rapists. We’re just cool with it?”
Season 4 of Reacher just wrapped, with its finale revealing that two seemingly innocent characters were actually undercover assassins from Indonesia, a plot twist that has nothing to do with domestic militias or election politics. Season 3 was released in February 2025, only a month after Trump’s second inauguration. That timeline is the entire basis for the theory that a Trump-related storyline got shelved somewhere along the way.
What Does This Actually Tell Conservative Viewers?
Hollywood has spent a decade turning entertainment into a lecture, and Ritchson’s Threads comment fits neatly into that pattern. An actor who plays a fictional vigilante wants credit for being politically brave while his own show remains one of the biggest hits on Amazon Prime Video, a company that has never suffered financially for employing him.
Notice also what didn’t happen here. Ritchson didn’t produce an email, a memo, or a single Amazon executive on the record confirming that “Die Trying” got pulled because Trump won. He offered a vague, self-flattering anecdote to a fan on social media, and entertainment outlets ran with it as though it were a documented corporate decision.
That’s worth sitting with for a second. A working actor with a direct financial interest in seeming edgy told a story that makes him sound braver and more persecuted than the facts can currently support. Readers have seen this movie before from Hollywood celebrities eager to signal disdain for Trump and the tens of millions of Americans who voted for him twice.
Late-night television collapsed in the ratings once it traded jokes for political sermons, and much of the rest of the entertainment industry has followed the same script. Audiences tuned out because they wanted to be entertained, not scolded by millionaires who never miss a paycheck no matter how loudly they denounce the country that made them famous.
Ritchson is also not shy about picking selective targets. He calls out Trump and the Christian church that supports him, yet nothing in his public record shows the same intensity aimed at Democrat officials or institutions with their own well-documented track records on issues Ritchson claims to care about, like accountability and transparency.
None of this means Reacher fans should expect anything different from Ritchson going forward. He has built a public persona around blunt, profanity-laced criticism of Trump, and that persona sells magazine profiles and podcast bookings just as reliably as his muscles sell action scenes. Whether Amazon ever greenlights “Die Trying” will depend far more on ratings and franchise economics than on any political grievance an actor airs on Threads.
What’s clear is that a single unconfirmed anecdote from a Hollywood actor became a viral story within days, further proof that any celebrity swipe at Trump gets amplified instantly, while the underlying claim itself goes almost entirely unverified.
Sources: NME, “Reacher storyline about white supremacist cancelled after Trump re-elected, claims Alan Ritchson”; TheWrap, “Alan Ritchson Says ‘Reacher’ Axed Plans to Adapt Novel About Fighting White Supremacists When ‘Someone Got Re-Elected'”; The Playlist, “Alan Ritchson Hints At Scrapped ‘Reacher’ White Supremacist Militia Plot From ‘Die Trying’ Due To Trump Re-Election”; Fox News, “Joe Biden Crashes Amazon’s Reacher Set During Police Chase Scene”; Breitbart, “Alan Ritchson Says Trump’s Re-Election Caused Amazon to Nix a ‘Reacher’ Storyline About Slaughtering ‘White Supremacist Militia'”