While some of President Donald Trump’s tariff policies might take months to bear fruit, a few have paid immediate dividends.
Of course, the dividend in this case involves a generous helping of glee over the president’s treatment of nauseating celebrities.
Sunday on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump announced that he would “begin the process of instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands” — a measure targeting the United Kingdom, in particular, where government policy has fostered a burgeoning film industry, and to which several prominent Trump-hating celebrities have fled.
“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death. Other Countries are offering all sorts of incentives to draw our filmmakers and studios away from the United States. Hollywood, and many other areas within the U.S.A., are being devastated,” Trump wrote.
With that in mind, the president declared “a National Security threat” based on what he called “messaging and propaganda!”
“WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!” he concluded.
What a classic illustration of how Trump thinks and operates.
At first glance, the relative demise of Hollywood would hardly strike the average American as a “National Security threat.” No doubt Trump himself did not mean that in a literal sense.
Do you support Trump’s massive tariff on studios that desert America?
More broadly, however, the theft of American industries does constitute a national security threat. Free-trade deals have hollowed out the American Heartland. For critical manufacturing, Americans have depended on China and other nations that employ slave or slave-like labor. Meanwhile, the establishment imported its own slave-like labor force in the form of illegal immigrants pouring across open borders. The entire Trump phenomenon emerged as a response to this betrayal of American citizens by their unworthy elected officials.
Thus, Trump’s urgent effort to rescue Hollywood makes sense in light of his major priorities.
And Hollywood needs rescuing thanks to the efforts of British officials, for which one can hardly blame them.
In short, according to the business news outlet Marketplace, the British government attracts filmmakers by offering major tax relief. British officials established that system in 2007 and then extended it to “high-end television” five years later.
Tax relief, of course, does not represent a clear “cost.” After all, absent tax relief, many filmmakers would not have chosen to make their movies in the U.K. The economically illiterate, however, have insisted on framing that policy as a “cost.”
“There are positives in that more films are being made in the U.K. as a result of the relief,” Alex Dunnagan of the tax-monitoring organization Tax Watch told Marketplace in 2023. “But it comes with a cost.”
“We’ve had ‘Quantum of Solace’ receiving 21 million pounds in tax relief. ‘Skyfall,’ 24 million pounds in tax relief. ‘Spectre,’ 30 million pounds in tax relief. And most recently, ‘No Time To Die,’ 47 million pounds in tax relief,” he added.
Those numbers, of course, represent hypothetical unpaid taxes rather than actual subsidies from taxpayers. One may argue about the fairness of offering tax relief to one industry and not to another. But no one can deny that tax relief constitutes a major incentive, in this case for filmmakers.
The British Film Institute does provide direct funding through a national lottery. Tax relief, however, represents the driving force behind the U.K.’s growing film industry.
“Jurassic World: Rebirth,” the “most expensive movie ever made,” per The U.K. Guardian, set to debut in theaters this July, received a “reimbursement” of more than 89 million pounds on account of the fact that producers chose to make the film in the U.K.
In other words, the British tax-relief policy has worked. And Trump, true to form, has countered with a successful policy of his own.
Of course, one wonders if the president waited until celebrities relocated to the U.K. before dropping the proverbial hammer on them. Needless to say, a 100 percent tariff on British-made films would force filmmakers to think twice before abandoning the United States.
And that has always been Trump’s larger goal: At minimum, make everyone think twice before abandoning the United States.
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