Trump's War on Foreign Films

Plus: Alcatraz reopening, Bukele corruption scandal, assisted suicide, and more...

Foreign films fucked: Another week, another round of tariffs! Yesterday, President Donald Trump said he would be imposing 100 percent tariffs on all foreign films. "WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!" declared Trump, who called foreign films a "national security threat" due to their ability to deliver propaganda to U.S. viewers.

"Other nations have been stealing the…movie-making capability of the United States. I said to a couple of people, 'What do you think?' I have done some very strong research over the last week, and we are making very few movies now," he told reporters over the weekend. "Hollywood is being destroyed. Now you have a grossly incompetent governor that allowed that to happen, so I am not just blaming other nations, but other nations, a lot of them, have stolen our movie industry. If they are not willing to make a movie inside the United States, and we should have a tariff on movies that come in. And not only that, governments are actually giving big money. They are supporting them financially. So that is sort of a threat to our country in a sense."

Stealing is an odd way of putting it. Did he just learn that other countries make movies too? And, yes, other countries will give special breaks to their film industries, in much the same way U.S. states already do: They vie for business, offering tax credits and other incentives to try to get movie production to their states. (This is why plenty of headlines have heralded Georgia, specifically Atlanta, as "Hollywood of the South.")

It's also difficult to suss out what exactly "foreign" means in this context. Will American crews from American studios who do post-production in America get penalized in some way for shooting on location abroad? "Film and television production in Los Angeles is down by more than one-third over the past 10 years," reports The New York Times. About half of the over-$40-million-budget films were partially produced abroad, sometimes for story reasons, other times for cost savings (which rankles unions back in L.A.). These films remain American, making the "national security" concern even more nonsensical. Is Trump trying to give handouts to movie-industry workers, protecting their jobs from going overseas?

That's not the only part of his complaint that's weird. Is Hollywood really "being destroyed," and is it foreign competition that's mostly responsible? Box office revenue has surely been declining, as people shift to less theater consumption and more at-home consumption; streaming services have shifted to more in-house movie production, with Amazon and Netflix emerging as legitimate competitors to Universal and Paramount and other stalwarts (though a lot of Amazon/Netflix original content is terrible, in my opinion); artificial intelligence may alter the future of screenwriting, much to the guild's chagrin. All of these are pressures Hollywood must adapt to. It's not clear that the biggest challenges facing the industry stem from, like, Walter Salles films, or the decades-old practice of shooting on location abroad.

Trump is generally worried about trade deficits. Lucky for him, the movie industry is a huge exporter to other parts of the world: "According to the Motion Picture Association, the industry generated a positive balance of trade in every major market in the world, with exports 3.1 times that of imports," reports Deadline. "The industry produced $22.6 billion in exports, and $15.3 billion in trade surplus."

As for his concerns about propaganda, I think propaganda and bias in longer-form content tends to be much easier to spot (and reflect on, and glean information from, and think critically about) than in shorter-form content, which can be much more insidious. Regardless of your thoughts on a TikTok ban, Trump appears to have softened his stance there, choosing to extend the date at which a ban is instituted again and again. This leads me to suspect that he's not actually worried about propaganda, but is just experimenting with using "national security" justifications for all manner of big-government interventions—a time-honored American tradition, but not a good one. Regardless, it is not the government's job to shield us from ideas, even propagandistic ones.

A tariff on foreign films is not the most pressing threat to our liberty. But it's yet another sign of Trump's preference for protectionism and his comfort limiting what types of products you have access to, sometimes for no real reason at all.

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Scenes from New York: "According to a new report by the city comptroller, Brad Lander, the city is sitting on at least 7,000 unpaid invoices from nonprofits, some dating back years, totaling over $1 billion," reports The New York Times. "This is money for groups that shelter the homeless, provide child and elder care, feed hungry New Yorkers, counsel the mentally ill, protect domestic violence victims and provide legal services to immigrants and defendants who can't afford lawyers." And that $1 billion figure may in fact be an undercount.

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QUICK HITS

• "President Donald Trump said Sunday that he has ordered several agencies to rebuild and reopen Alcatraz, an infamous federal penitentiary that closed in the 1960s and has since become a popular tourist destination," reports The Washington Post. "In a post on social media, Trump said he directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Homeland Security Department, the Justice Department and others to work together to open a 'substantially enlarged and rebuilt' Alcatraz that would house the country's 'most ruthless and violent' offenders." Since Alcatraz is an island, getting supplies in and out is expensive; it's unclear how exactly Trump plans to pay for his idea.
• A good read from Reason's Eric Boehm: "5 Times the Trump Team Told Americans To Accept Being Poorer"
• The Central American news outlet El Faro recently released footage of "leaders of the 18th Street Revolucionarios gang who not only cut deals for years with the entourage of [President] Nayib Bukele, but also escaped the country with the complicity of his government" and who revealed "details about the agreements that permitted Bukele's ascent to total power." Now, Bukele's attorney general's office is allegedly preparing arrest warrants for some El Faro journalists.
• Last week an assisted suicide bill passed New York's Assembly. Now it must go through the Senate and be signed into law by Governor Kathy Hochul. If that happens, it would become the 11th U.S. state to permit legalized suicide for certain patients.
• Meanwhile, the U.K. is also considering assisted suicide, including permitting pregnant women to kill themselves if eligible. I am probably in the minority of libertarians here, but the global expansion of physician-assisted suicide does not feel like moral progress to me:

Utterly bleak prospect imagined here for the future of assisted dying, so perhaps the least important point is that the government can barely bring itself to say 'mother' or 'woman', preferring 'pregnant person'.

(This document is recent, released yesterday) pic.twitter.com/AWdy1BDKWI

— The Other Half (@OtherHalfOrg) May 3, 2025