When Donald Trump named Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone as his “special ambassadors to Hollywood” back in January, no one was quite sure what to make of it. But if we’ve learned anything from what’s happened since Trump let Elon Musk fire up the chainsaw as head of an initiative named after a Shiba Inu meme, it’s that these things are never just fodder for easy jokes.
Voight and his manager reportedly met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend to discuss what Deadline termed “a plan to save Hollywood.” And on Sunday night, Trump announced, via his Truth Social account, that he was ordering the Department of Commerce to place a “100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” [sic]
“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” Trump wrote. “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. This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick responded “We’re on it,” to Trump’s post on Twitter, feeding the sense that something might actually come of this besides talk.
Trump’s concern about so-called “runaway production” wasn’t pulled entirely out of thin air. The issue of productions moving out of Los Angeles—and often abroad—in search of more favorable tax incentives has been a hot topic in the entertainment industry for at least a decade, and the situation has only intensified in recent years. The Vice President of IATSE (the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represents 168,000 crew and craftspeople) told the New York Times last month that California had lost 18,000 production jobs in the last three years alone. “We are allowing California to become to the entertainment industry what Detroit has become to the auto industry,” IATSE’s Michael F. Miller Jr. said then.
California governor Gavin Newsom had proposed doubling California’s tax incentive program back in October. Other California lawmakers have put forth even more generous bills. Trump himself referenced the kinds of incentives drawing productions abroad in his own post, and trying to lure productions back to the US with incentives of our own seemed like the logical reaction. Indeed, an incentive program was largely what Voight had been expected to broach with Trump.
Instead, Trump announced his plan for “a 100% tariff,” with scant details on what that would actually apply to or mean. It’s not as container ships are arriving at our docks packed with film reels. All of which raises the obvious question: why did Trump respond to the groundswell of support for production tax credits by announcing a tariff?
To some extent, the obvious answer is probably the correct one: Trump has become obsessed with tariffs as his economic cure-all in his second term, an infatuation possibly even stronger than the one he had with building a wall in the lead up to his first. It’s like he has one giant button on his desk, and whenever a problem arises, he tries pressing it again. Other countries, like migrants before them, simply aren’t paying their fair share, in his mind.
