Trump Misses the Big Picture on Tinseltown Tariffs

A journey of 2,392 miles lies between Youngstown, Ohio, and Hollywood, California. President Donald Trump’s protectionism has completed a journey of a similar distance. Trump’s defense of tariffs once appealed to the interests of the “forgotten man” of the Rust Belt, to shuttered factories and “hollowed-out” manufacturing towns. This impulse, however misguided, has its origin in certain corners of the American political tradition. It has become apparent in recent months that President Trump has wandered into quite different territory. The ambitions of this man of system surpass the ambitions of the American System. Late last month, Trump reiterated his intent to levy a tariff of 100 percent on foreign-made movies, which would, according to a May Truth Social post, ameliorate “a National Security threat.” Tinseltown will receive steel-town protection. The narrative of American revitalization the Trump administration hopes to act out is bound for a plot twist: if incorporated into policy, Trump’s latest proposal will injure American consumers and, regrettably, many American filmmakers.

After recovering from the strain brought on by the mental gymnastics necessary to believe the state of American filmography endangers national security, it’s natural to wonder how a movie tariff might operate in practice. The U.S. Treasury might collect a fee equal to a foreign-made film’s production budget, or perhaps to its box-office revenues. The Trump administration has yet to provide particulars.

The Trump administration will discover the perennial difficulty that tariffs invite—nay, incite—retaliation. Much of the domestic film industry’s domination, and its transmission of American culture, depends on American filmmakers’ ready access to foreign theaters and screens. Whatever benefits might be derived from protection must be considered alongside the likelihood that other nations will put up similar trade barriers against American-made movies.

Hollywood is an odd beneficiary of Trumpian largesse, considering the administration’s belief that the unfair trade practices of foreign nations can be descried in trade deficits. “The film industry had more than $22 billion in exports in 2023, with a trade surplus between $14.9 billion and $15.3 billion,” the American Action Forum (AAF) noted in July.

AAF continued: “The top-10 [sic] movie studios accounted for slightly more than 85 percent of the domestic box office between 1995 and 2025, meaning Americans overwhelmingly watch American-made movies from American movie studios on American screens. Widening the scope to the top 200 studios, the picture casts even more doubt on Trump’s movie tariff, as 99.6 percent of the domestic box office went to U.S. film studios.”

Following President Trump’s recent announcement, Stephen Kent, media director for the Consumer Choice Center, argued that, whatever the difficulties Hollywood might now contend with, the primary dangers to American filmmaking originate in oppressive local mismanagement. “According to [actor Rob] Lowe,” Kent wrote, “it’s now cheaper to fly an entire production crew to Ireland than it is to walk across a studio parking lot in Los Angeles. That’s not globalization run amok, that’s failed liberal governance and industry capture by the labor unions happening in broad daylight.” Moreover, Kent observed, quintessentially American productions—from George Lucas’s Star Wars to recent Daily Wire endeavors—have often been filmed, in whole or in part, abroad.

The Trump administration has lost the protectionist plot—and it was a poor narrative, rife with plot holes, from the beginning.