With his current tariffs facing enormous pressure, Trump announced new tariffs on “foreign” made movies to make up the difference.
If there is one thing that Trump’s tariffs are good at, it’s crashing the stock markets repeatedly sending the broader economy into a tailspin as recession looms, and creating supply chain shocks. In short, the tariffs are great if your goal is to blow up the US economy.
Indeed, with the threat of empty store shelves looming, Trump is seemingly backing down on his idiotic tariffs as he is suddenly actively seeking “deals” to head off the messes he is creating. This was seen with his openness to meet with the Canadian Prime Minister as well as him approaching China to work out a “deal”. Even Trump, through the layers upon layers of dementia, is realizing that there is an incoming shit storm as a result of his tariffs and is actively working on minimizing the damage he created.
More recently, we’ve seen another sign that even Trump realizes his tariffs aren’t working. Trump is falling back on his backup plan again to just target specific industries that might not crash the economy/stock market (for Trump, they are one in the same even though they are not). He seemingly through the proverbial dart at the wall and, this time, that dart landed on the film industry. So, while probably on the can, Trump announced that he’ll be slapping tariffs on all “foreign” made movies. From the Guardian:
Donald Trump on Sunday announced on his Truth Social platform a 100% tariff on all movies “produced in Foreign Lands”, saying the US film industry was dying a “very fast death” due to the incentives that other countries were offering to draw American film-makers.
In his post, he claimed to have authorised the commerce department and the US trade representative to immediately begin instituting such a tariff.
“This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat,” Trump said in the Truth Social post. “It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!
“WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!” Trump added.
The announcement seemingly took the White House staff off guard (not really news, that happens all the time) and his staff said that they are working on it:
The commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, posting on X said: “We’re on it.” Neither Lutnick nor Trump provided any details on the implementation. It was not immediately clear whether the move would target production companies, foreign or American, producing films overseas.
Of course there are no details. This is just something Trump randomly thought of recently. Like everything else, there is no plan or details, it’s just policy by improvisation because Trump doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. When those improvised plans collapse, Trump backpedals and starts conjuring up new plans. This happened earlier this year when Trump announced tariffs back in February. There was no thought behind it, it was just across the board tariffs based on pure stupidity and a lack of how global economics works. When that invariably crashed the stock markets (back when Trump still paid attention to them), Trump put in place a 30 day pause because he knew his plan backfired. In fact, when the tariffs resumed 30 days later, the stock market crashed again and Trump partially lifted those tariffs.
In fact, it is those back and forth tariffs that got him to start looking at specific industries to randomly tariff. That included steel and aluminum, computer chips and semiconductors, dairy and lumber, and others. The senile thinking here was seemingly that if Trump can find a specific industry that won’t send the whole economy into a tailspin, then he “got away with it” because he wrongly insists that tariffs are great no matter how many times they fail spectacularly.
Eventually, Trump psyched himself up and decided that the stock market crashes are no big deal and are part of the plan all along. The story he completely made up was that it’s all just temporary pain for long term gain. Confirming it with himself that this sounds great, Trump realized that was the ticket and went ahead with the “Liberation Day” tariffs across the board. That, predictably, created a 4 day stock market crash. It wasn’t until the threat of empty store shelves and widespread economic collapse that Trump finally had enough of his own stupidity and started rolling things back.
Now, we are back to this fallback plan of tariffing specific industries. This time, he randomly picked the film industry (and I’m sure the MPAA is thrilled by that one). As others have noted already, other countries like Canada are impacted because countries like ours offer rebates and incentives to film in other locations. Because of the uncertainty of this obviously completely made up tariff “plan”, a lot of that is thrown into question. The White House, no doubt, is busily trying to figure out how to carry out this “plan”, so it’ll take time for the details to be sorted out. This before the plan inevitably fails like every other tariff plan Trump has come up with.
All of this just to insist that tariffs are great and wonderful. This while completely misunderstanding what a trade deficit actually is and how tariffs work in the real world. For the former, it just means one country is buying more than the other. For the latter, it’s the domestic consumers who generally pay for the tariffs, not foreign governments. Of course, actually stating facts and understanding how the real world works is all just woke far left communism as far as the far right Trump clown car is concerned. This as Trump continues to try, yet again, to get a tariff in place that won’t completely destroy the US economy. Yeah, good luck with that one.
