Jeffrey Blehar writes for National Review Online about one of President Donald Trump’s latest tariff ideas.
Politico sought to associate these newly announced tariffs with the administration’s semi-honorary “ambassador to Hollywood,” actor Jon Voight. But from my reading of that story, these tariffs seem to have come from Trump and not from someone else who pitched him the idea. Bloomberg followed up with a story indicating as much: Voight and his manager Steven Paul apparently briefed Trump over the weekend on a plan for tax incentives and credits to encourage Hollywood to film more in the U.S. — rather middle-of-the-road stuff. Trump took that meeting and then — in a manner almost beyond parody — reached for the only tool in his policy kit: tariffs. Naturally, Hollywood is beside itself, as any industry that had just been dealt a massive and creatively destructive blow would be.
On a procedural level, Trump’s “reasoning” is galling enough. The casual way Trump defines as a “national security threat ” the entirely innocuous act of a country’s offering tax breaks to studios to film there, and the way he then immediately turns to use this as formal excuse to unilaterally impose tariffs, is so warped that I suspect it will be lost in the thicket of commentary about this issue. Leave aside the fact that Trump’s diagnosis of Hollywood’s problems reads like that of someone who stopped attending theaters 20 years ago; the fact that he is deploying such transparently capricious “reasoning” as a legal fig leaf for industry-shattering tariffs should be understood properly as an authentic constitutional problem.
Beyond that, nothing about this idea makes even the slightest lick of sense to anyone who would actually want to make Hollywood great again. Trump is essentially placing tariffs on the idea of filming on location — and, in so doing, telling Hollywood what kinds of stories it is now allowed to tell, unless it wants to start paying impossible amounts for the privilege of doing otherwise.
