Another week, another piece of economic sabre-rattling from Donald Trump. “Hollywood, and many other areas within the USA, are being devastated,” the president wrote on his Truth Social platform on Sunday. “Therefore, I am authorizing the Department of Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative, to immediately begin the process of instituting a 100 per cent Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” Note the demonising capitalisation of those last two words.
It should be emphasised that it is not a deadly influx of British melodramas, Nigerian comedies and Japanese gangster flicks that Trump is worried about, but the fact that the majority of Hollywood films are being shot outside America, primarily on grounds of cost.
